t
THE CURRENT STATE OF POSSESSION STUDIES
AS A CROSS-DISCIPLINARY PROJECT
ECSTATIC RELIGION: A STUDY OF SHAMANISM AND
SPIRIT POSSESSION
By I. M. Lewis
New York: Routledge, 1971; 2nd ed., 1989
Pp. 200. Paper, $24.99.
MUSIC AND TRANCE: A THEORY OF THE RELATIONS
BETWEEN MUSIC AND POSSESSION
By Gilbert Rouget
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985
Pp. xix + 397. Paper, $24.00.
THE MOUTHS OF PEOPLE, THE VOICE OF GOD:
BUDDHISTS AND MUSLIMS IN A FRONTIER
COMMUNITY OF LADAKH
By Smriti Srinivas
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998
Pp. x + 219. $23.99.
THE SPIRITS ARE DRUNK: COMPARATIVE
APPROACHES TO CHINESE RELIGION
By Jordan Paper
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995
Pp. xx + 315. Paper, $19.95.
A WOMAN’S WEAPON: SPIRIT POSSESSION IN THE
TALE OF GENJI
By Doris R. Bargen
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997
Pp. xx + 379. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $24.95.
PIERCED BY MURUGAN’S LANCE: RITUAL, POWER,
AND MORAL REDEMPTION AMONG MALAYSIAN
HINDUS
By Elizabeth Fuller Collins
DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997
Pp. viii + 246. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $22.50.
SPIRITS IN CULTURE, HISTORY, AND MIND
Edited by Jeanette Marie Mageo and Alan Howard
New York: Routledge, 1996
Pp.282. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $20.99.
THE POSSESSED AND THE DISPOSSESSED: SPIRITS,
IDENTITY, AND POWER IN A MADAGASCAR
MIGRANT TOWN
By Lesley A. Sharp
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993
Pp. xix + 345. Paper, $18.95.
SPIRIT POSSESSION: MODERNITY AND POWER IN
AFRICA
Edited by Heike Behrend and Ute Luig
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999
Pp. xxii + 170. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $22.95.
THE CHANNELING ZONE: AMERICAN SPIRITUALITY
IN AN ANXIOUS AGE
By Michael F. Brown
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997
Pp. xiii + 236. Cloth, $22.00; paper, $14.00.
Reviewer: Frederick M.Smith
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
S tudy of spirit or deity possession has historically stood at the
chaotic intersection of anthropology, psychology, religion, so-
ciology, history, medicine, and performance theory. Regard-
less of the disciplinary bias of a particular study, most theorizing
about possession has been through the idioms of psychology, an-
thropology, and sociology. Sometimes these idioms combine to
present acoherent explanatory or interpretive perspective, I while at
other times the perspective is overcrowded or overdetermined. One
of the recurring characteristics of the study of possession is the
problem of relating it to recognized categories: Can it be identified
as hysteria, schizophrenia, or some other variety of aberrant behav-
ior or mental illness drawn from psychoanalysis? Is it shamanism
(however that may be defined) or some other form of divinatory or
oracular mediumship? Is it nothing more than a (usually) feminine
exercise in reclaiming social control and power from (usually) mas-
culine hegemony or priestly repression, which is to say a compensa-
tory mechanism for marginalization? Is it an attempt to legitimate
an oppositional subculture by establishing a new psychological and
moral order based on an inversion of the dominant order? And so
on.
In other words, the usual strategy has been to adopt a functional-
ist approach to possession. This results from the dominance of an-
thropological and psychoanalytic method in possession studies; the
investigator nearly always assumes that whatever is going on is not
possession by an “other” or, at the very least, that whether or not it
really is possession is not a particularly germane question. Thus,
study of possession must be limited to what is empirically verifi-
able, which is to say its specific cultural function, be it communica-
tion, social empowerment, or psychological healing. Indeed, the
question of the ontological status of the possessing spirits or deities
is rarely, if ever, considered relevant to social-scientificor psycho-
analytic method. Nevertheless, a tendency has arisen in the last two
decades to introduce an interdisciplinary approach that recognizes
the imperative of examining possession as a culturally constructed
symbolic medium that operates in relation to the society within
which it is situated,* while not ignoring or denying the truth claims
dimension of possession. P
of the individuals or grou under study, i.e., the uniquely religious
What is it that makes possession such an attractive subject of
study? The veritable explosion in possession studies is not merely
the result of a spell seemingly cast by possession on ethnographers
of all disciplinary stripes; there is increasing recognition that POS-
.a@&/Religiow studies ReYiew
session is not only an underregarded and highly revealing type of
human behavior but that the practice is increasing throughout the
world, not only in “traditional societies” in Africa, Oceania, India,
and elsewhere, but in “rootless” industrialized societies as well.
I arrived at this topic via an atypical path. Rather than through an
interest in possession as a window into understanding the psychol-
ogy or ethnohistory of a contemporary traditional society ravaged
by colonialism, political upheaval, or alcoholism, or the mecha-
nisms through which personhood is constituted by an exotic other
(and therefore in some measure by oneself), I came to this field
through an interest in deity and spirit possession in classical Indian
(largely Sanskrit) literature! In searching through the scholarly lit-
erature on possession, I discovered how little of it acknowledges
any kind of deep history. Indeed, very few studies of possession as it
appears in world literature have been undertaken, and virtually no
ethnographic studies of possession among non- or semi-literate
people relate the local phenomenon to a broader regional,
inter-regional, or even worldwide base or to its depiction in litera-
ture, therefore failing to situate it as part of a tradition of experience
that may have extensions in diverse cultural and cross-cultural di-
rections.
The ten books under review have been selected because they 1)
are relatively recent, 2) are worthy of constructivecomment, and 3)
present a variety of perspectives and methodological approaches.
One study is biased toward shamanism but is considered by many
the obligatory place to begin thinking about possession (Lewis);
one wide-rangingstudy, also considered a classic by some, is on the
relation between music and possession (Rouget);one is on classical
Japanese literature and is the only focused literary study in the
group (Bargen); one offers a new interpretation of ancient Chinese
religion, employingas source material second-millenniumBCE ico-
nography and inscriptions as well as early Daoist literature, both of
which detail the roles of different ecstatic functionaries(Paper);one
is on possession in Ladakh in northern India (Srinivas); one breaks
new methodological ground in offering an interpretation of the
Thaipusam festival as performed by Tamil Hindus in Penang, Ma-
laysia (Collins); one edited collection brings together a number of
social-scientific approaches to the widespread phenomenon of
spirit possession in the Pacific Basin (Mageo et al.); two focus on
possession in Africa (Sharp, Behrend and Luig); and one examines
New Age trance channeling in modem America (Brown). I must
emphasize that this selection far from exhausts the subject; in a
1994 review article, Janice Boddy cites 221 English-language an-
thropological and ethnographic studies of possession. I would not
be surprised if nearly as many articles and books have appeared on
the subject since Boddy’s article was published.
I. M. Lewis. whose book Ecstatic Religion (1971,2nd ed. 1989)
remains mandatory reading in the field, recognizesthat “possession
is a culturally normative experience” (57) in many places. Like
most anthropologists,he seeks to determine the social etiology and
meaning of possession as well as its culturally determined psycho-
logical dimensions. He seriously examines trance, ecstasy, hypno-
sis, and shamanism, ultimately concluding that the latter shares an
important process with possession-a reciprocity between gods
and humans. He posits a homogeneity between shamanism and
spirit possession, arguing, contra Eliade, that “the Tungus evidence
makes nonsense of the assumption that shamanism and spirit pos-
session are totally different phenomena, belonging necessarily to
different cosmological systems and to separate historical stages of
development” (55-56). In drawing this equivalence, Lewis delin-
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
eates a (wholly presumed and uncompromising) functionalist soci-
ology of possession states with two contrasting psychosocial loci of
possessionthat he labels “central” and “peripheral.”Central posses-
sion, highly valued by some, supports prevailing political, moral,
and religious beliefs and views spirits as sympathetic to these. Pe-
ripheral possession indicates an invasion of evil spirits, undesirable,
immoral, and dangerous.
Lewis’s work, while much cited and admired, has also been the
target of extensive criticism. Perhaps primary among these criti-
cisms is that his distinction between centrality and peripherality be-
comes highly ambiguous and inconsequential or disappears alto-
gether upon close contextual analysis.5 For example, according to
Lewis’s criteria, virtually all possession in South Asia could be re-
garded as central. A second objection,leveled by Obeyesekere,who
studied possession in Sri Lanka, is that many possession states do
not share with shamanismthe essential feature of reciprocity (1984,
13-14)6 A third criticism is that although Lewis is largely free from
Western cultural biases, his characteristic terms “ecstasy” and “ec-
static” are drawn from Western theological discourse and cannot be
applied unhesitatingly to many possession accounts, including, for
example, most of what we find in South Asia. Lewis describes ec-
stasy as “those transports of mystical exaltation in which man’s
whole being seems to fuse in a glorious communion with the divin-
ity” (15). This definition is coterminous with only a fraction of pos-
session states observed in South Asia. Perhaps the sharpest critique
of Lewis addresses his association of possession with marginalized
people, his “assumption that possession provides the powerless
with a means to symbolicallyexpress social, economic, or political
oppression” (Sharp 1993, 15): While many of the contexts of pos-
session worldwide seem to confirm this, the preponderance of evi-
dence in India (and other areas) bears this out in only the most super-
ficial manner, as the books under review amply reveal. While no
one can deny that power relations are an important factor in posses-
sion, the evidence from both classical and contemporarypossession
demonstrates that it is by no means the province of the powerless
alone.
Gilbert Rouget’s Music and Trance (1985) recognizes that mu-
sic and drama are of utmost importance in bringing about posses-
sion states. Of all the books under review, this one casts the widest
net, as the author demonstrates deep knowledge of cultural and rit-
ual detail, psychoanalytic theory, ancient history, music, and
ethnomusicology.With this intellectual arsenal, Rouget reflects on
possession in contemporaryAfrica, classical Greece (focusing par-
ticularly on Plato), and the Islamic world. In the end, he proposes a
general theory of possession that encompasses both individual and
community representations:the individual must be receptive to “an
emotional event” that submerges one’s normal state of conscious-
ness, while the community must agree that the emergent state is “a
sign of the will or presence of a spirit or divinity.” In other words,
accordingto Rouget, possession is not possession unless it is recog-
nized as such by both the individual and the community. The com-
munity also exploits or domesticates this jolting, often incompre-
hensible, event “with the intention of establishing it as a mode of
communicationwith the divine.” Furthermore, it identifies the pos-
sessed individual with the deity or spirit responsible for the posses-
sion and then legitimizesthis possession through some sort of theat-
rical performance (322). Thus, music, dance, and performance are
means of socializing possession. Although Rouget posits
theatricalizationas acomponent in his general theory, in literary ac-
counts (in Sanskrit texts, for example) possession is often attested
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001
without the accompaniment of music, dance, or dramatic perfor-
mance.
In The Mouths of People, the Voice of God (1 998),a study of pos-
session among the Buddhists of Ladakh, Smriti Srinivas demon-
strates that possession is an integrated activity in the sense that its
social, linguistic, psychological, and ritual components operate to-
gether. Because personhood is a more or less consistent reflection
of these variables (an interdependence of social relationships, lan-
guage use, culturally conditionedpsychological states, inherited re-
ligious ideology and practice, and the vagaries of individual physi-
cal and emotional constitution), personal behavior is theoretically
unstable, thus constantly in need of cultural sanction and legitima-
tion. Within the Ladakhi cultural system, which includes social,
economic, and political arrangementswith Muslims, possession is a
culturally sanctioned and recognizedform of unusual, evidently un-
stable, behavior that ironically serves to reverse, albeit temporarily,
areas of perceived weakness or imbalance such as social or political
oppression, psychological distress, or even physical debility. Al-
though possession is understood in Ladakh to originate in weak-
ness, it nevertheless occupies an important mediatory function. In
possession, the self-interest inherent in individual agency is over-
come, replaced with a force that is, unlikely enough, more believ-
able and trustworthy than the individual. This is the irony of posses-
sion, and one that should be considered wherever possession
occurs. I am referring, of course, only to oracular or initiatory pos-
session, in which dilemmas are resolved precisely because individ-
ual volition is minimized to the point of disappearance.This is to be
distinguished from disease-generating exogenous possession,
which is a major category in, for example, the classicalIndian medi-
cal literature (iiyurveda).
Srinivas’s primary focus in the half of her book that specifically
addresses possession is a Buddhist monk called Gelong, who also
served as a priest in one of the villages in Nubra, the region of
Ladakh in which Srinivas conducted her fieldwork. Gelong was
possessed by a local lha called Chamshing, a protector deity
(dharmp&z)who, through many rebirths during which he con-
quered his anger, rose to an exalted state from his previous condi-
tion as an enemy spirit. Possession is quite common in Ladakh, not
least, according to Gelong, because with the Chinese occupation of
Tibet and the subsequent destruction of the temple images in which
the deities were embodied, the deities “fled to Ladakh to seek their
residence in people’s bodies.” According to Gelong’s divination,
“seventy-five h a s would come to reside in Nubra (at the moment
there are twenty-one), exiled from their former homes” (134).
A large number of languages are used in Ladakh, including clas-
sical Tibetan, the Ladakhi dialect of Tibetan, Hindi, Urdu,
Kashmiri, and local languages such as Dogri. While the language of
popular religion in this area requires further work, especially in the
highly nuanced area of code-switching, the terminology for spirit
possession appearsto be derived from Tibetan and Indo-Aryan.The
general term for a spirit or deity is lha, which may be benevolent or
malevolent in nature. The possessed individual is known as a luyar,
or vessel for a lha. Malevolent possession is caused by lha known as
dre or femo,the later being an evil female spirit. Srinivas identifies
four types of ritual practitioners who treat this type of spirit posses-
sion: the l a m , who “ensures peace and can help a man’s spirit reach
heaven”; the onbo, who “removes evil and assists in securing
earthly and other benefits”;the Ihaba, who “sees the spirit of a man
and its imaginings as if in a mirror’’; and the larje, who “takes care
of the body” (132). Possession is caused by debilitated la, the life
Religious Studies Review / a 5
force that sustains the body (lus).In “negative”possession,vitiation
or loss of la is conducive to lassitude,physical weariness,emotional
distress, and illness (126). These, in turn, lead to a more immediate
cause of possession, called mikha in Ladakhi, literally “mouth” (cf.
Sanskrit mukha). Mikhu refers to that which emanates from the
mouth, specifically gossip, derogatory or slanderous speech, and
idle or uselesschatter, which, consistentwith Buddhist doctrine,are
considered counterproductiveto religious or spiritual goals. Oracu-
lar or “positive” possession, on the other hand, is due to weakened
la, which leads to a kind of madness characterized by loss of
self-control and spiritual crisis. An individual subject to this type of
possession undergoes a kind of initiation, a life-crisis ritual called
lhapchok, in which the newfound status of the oracle becomes for-
mally recognized. The oracle, who inherits his lha from lineages of
practicing oracles, including parents and grandparents, now under-
goes a period of training that includes sucking out poison and exor-
cism, all the while leading an otherwise ordinary life as a farmer or
government worker.
The central thesis of Jordan Paper’s The Spirits are Drunk
(1995) is that interpretations of Chinese religion are flawed by
Eurocentrism, androcentrism, and inattention to comparative per-
spectives. Furthermore, Paper asserts, the usual notion that China
has three religions-Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism-is
equally flawed. It is better, he says, to view Chinese religion as uni-
tary,jettisoning the dichotomy between the three elite traditionsand
“popular religion.” The core of this unitary Chinese religion is a
common ritual involving the sharing of food, both with others from
the same community and with spirits, the origins of which Paper
seeks to unearth in pre-Han texts and protohistoric (Shang dynasty)
iconography. Most important are taotie, masklike animal faces in-
scribed on bones and bronze vessels, as well as fabulous birds and
composite animals such as birds with elephant faces. Paper inter-
prets this as evidence for shamanism in the second millennium BCE.
He supports this with references to Zhou texts that speak of
bird-headed spirits. He asserts that shamanism, likely involving
spirit flight, gradually gave way to more recognizable and histon-
cally verifiable spirit mediumship and mysticism around the begin-
ning of the Western Zhou dynasty (1050-771 BCE). This he sees in
both the changing iconography and in early Daoist literature.
Like many other scholars of shamanism, Paper questions the
definitions of this term proposed by Eliade and Lewis. Eliade
(1964),says Paper, is too restrictivein limiting shamanismto trance
flight along the model of the Siberian Tungus shamans (51). Lewis,
on the other hand, is too broad in following “the British anthropo-
logical practice of calling all ecstatic functionaries ‘shamans”’
( 1 11). With reservations that allow for different cultural practices
and configurations, Paper accepts Hultkrantz’s definition of a sha-
man “as a social functionary who, with the help of guardian spirits,
attains ecstasy to create a rapport with the supernatural world on be-
half of his group members” (1973, 34; cited by Paper, 52). The
value of Paper’s account for possession studies is in his disentan-
gling ecstatic functionaries (also a major component of Rouget’s
agenda) and clarifying some of the definitional issues that beset all
who work in possession studies. With respect to the important dis-
tinction between shamanic trance and possession trance, Paper
states:
The difference is in large part one of volition: shamans request the
spirit(s)to come and assist them; mediums are usually involuntarily
possessed, at least at first, by spirits who control them. In
mediumism,the spirits use the bodies of the mediums to communi-
206 / Religious studka Review Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001
women in Genji, not only is possession a weapon to counter domes-
tic repression,but it is also a way to reassert spiritual authority in the
face of a male-dominated Buddhist clergy.
In short, Bargen constructs a cogent case for possession as “a
woman’s weapon” against male dominance in medieval Japan. But,
according to Aileen Gatten in a lengthy review of the book (1999),
this is little more than a construction. Gatten offers an important
critical point. Society, she says, is not always well represented by
“[plutting fictional characters on the couch” (243). The corollary is
that in Heian aristocratic society, which Murasaki Shikibu tries to
capture in her epic, women were not radically disempowered. In
fact, there are many examples in which “women were ‘empowered’
by much the same magic combination as men: good birth, plenty of
high-yielding property, and amiable connections with powerful
people” (248). Gatten raises another issue that Bargen would surely
contest: that Bargen imposes “modern moral and cultural standards
on a remote non-Western literary work” (249-50). For example,
Bargen’s disapproval of Genji’s adultery and the anorexia nervosa
of one of the female characters does not, believes Gatten, reflect
medieval Japanese concerns. Indeed, the notions, i.e., the ‘‘con-
structions,” of adultery and anorexia nervosa would be alien to
Heian Japan.
Whether or not Gatten is correct about this, it brings up the issue
of cultural sensitivity in interpretation of possession phenomena,
and in this, I have no doubt, the present generation of scholars is far
in advance of its predecessors.Bargen is one of the few researchers
in the 1990s as attested in the current batch of books under review,
to use Freudian psychoanalysis as a crucial tool in the interpretation
of possession, a practice that was once extremely common. It ap-
pears that Freud’s fall, or at least decline, from grace among practic-
ing psychoanalysts several decades ago has finally spread to such
fields as anthropology and religion, where it was once fashionable
to interpret cultural phenomena along Freudian lines.lo
Pierced by Murugan’s Lance (1997), by Elizabeth Fuller Col-
linsihas been reviewed in these pages previously, but from the per-
spective of diaspora studies rather than possession (Korom 2000,
24). The subject of this volume is the Thaipusam, an annual festival
sponsored by the Tamil Hindu community in Malaysia, in honor of
Murugan, their primary deity. Collins examines the festival as it is
practiced in Penang from several perspectives, including caste and
other social arrangements,ritual practices, economic relations, the
political uses of Thaipusam,and the hidden but recoverablepsycho-
logical states of the participants. Her aim is “perspicuous presenta-
tion” (13, a phrase drawn from Wittgenstein that strongly influ-
enced Geertz’s notion of “thick description.” “Perspicuous
presentation,” Wittgenstein says, is “a way of setting out the whole
field together by making easy the passage from one part of it to an-
other” (1979, 9e; cited by Collins, 157). In other words, Collins
aims for a grand theory of the Thaipusam, in which all the parts are
connected. Her methodological approaches are anthropologicaland
psychoanalytic; one of her original contributions is that she demon-
strates the philosophical foundations and contexts of these ap-
proaches. She strives for “a culturally sensitive framework for psy-
choanalytic interpretation, as opposed to using the paradigms of
Freudian and Jungian theory developed to help people in Western
societies understand their experience of self’ (15).
Collins is sensitive to the distinctions Tamil speakers draw for
different statesof possession. She observes that the Hindu Tamils of
Penang recognize three categories of trance: cimiyZ!i, the posses-
sion of a temple priest (piijiri) by a goddess or warrior deity; pzy
Religious Studies Review / W7
pirichu, literally “having a ghost,” possession by ghosts or demonic
spirits; and urul, “the trance of divine grace experienced by those
who fulfill vows during religious festivals” (111). Collins is sympa-
thetic to indigenous interpretations, taking great care to point out
that phenomena such as possession trance and hypnosis are cultural
constructions that must be treated contextually. She even discusses
the various constructions of the English word “trance.” Beyond
this, Collins relies on Western psychoanalytic theory and catego-
ries, and it is here that her ethnography flags, even if she never com-
pletely loses sight of her subject. She is clearly unfamiliar with in-
digenous South Asian psychoanalytic theory and categories as
found in Indian medical (Zyurvedic)literature, which would have
helped her to situate both the views of her informants and the West-
ern psychoanalytic discourse.
Thaipusam is a new year’s festival, occurring on the first full
moon of the Tamil new year (January or February), a time ripe for
making vows or resolutions. The main activities are 1) the ritual
bathing (abhifeka)of the image of Murugan in the temple before
dawn; 2) a procession of the festival deity (ursuvumiirri)around the
temple; and 3) the act of vow fulfillment to Murugan, called the “of-
fering of kZvuyi.” The latter entails carrying a kZvuti, an arched
wooden or metal frame decorated with colored paper, tinsel, fresh
flowers, fruit, and sometimes peacock feathers, as a form of pen-
ance. The kZvu!i is attached to the body of some of the devoteeswith
a number of metal hooks (as many as forty to sixty), which pierce
the flesh. Most of these kZvu!i bearers enter a trance state and per-
form a special ritual dance. The kZvu!i bearers, and many others as
well, may also have their cheeks, tongues, or foreheadspierced with
hooks and spears (“Murugan’s lance”), which informants assert
would be unbearable and therefore impossible unless they are first
possessed by Murugan. l 1 The offering of kZvuri can be in fulfill-
ment of a vow or to give thanks for favors obtained from Murugan.
Examples of vows to “carry kZvuyi“ and undergo the severe austeri-
ties incumbenton its preparation, as well as the impalement,posses-
sion, and (possible) pain of the vow, are usually quite prosaic, such
as seeking divine help to cure a disease, locate a proper match for a
son or daughter, and so on (81ff.).
After a great deal of reflection, Collins sees the purpose of the rit-
ual vow fulfillment on Thaipusam as, above all else, “moral re-
demption” (16). Although Thaipusam encompasses political pro-
test and embodies religious empowerment, it is, says Collins, moral
redemption that is the primary motive cause of ritual vow fulfill-
ment in Thaipusam. Possession and other trance and transgressive
behavior of Thaipusam expose the weak links in the local ethos of
social control and reconfigure the body politic as an egalitarian so-
cial movement, at least for the brief duration of the festival. Simi-
larly, both worldly desires and religious aspirations are given mo-
mentum by the acquisition of empowering and ecstatic trance
states. Nevertheless, Collins sees the Thaipusam festival, along
with its ritual vow fulfillment, primarily as instantiating “ethical
and collective values that exist only through the commitments that
people make and act upon” (185). She contests the prevailing view
in anthropology that rituals primarily implicate people in relations
of power. She does this by recourse to the later philosophy of
Wittgenstein that describes how symbolic acts, embodied in ritual,
compel people to renew moral commitments and seek a more just
social order: ‘“Takenalone, a theory that shows how ritual is used to
construct forms of power fails to reflect the power of ritual in con-
figuring a moral order and breeds cynicism, thereby eroding con-
ceptions of moral autonomy and agency” (186). In the end, Collins
208 / Religious Studies Review
sees the ritual vow fulfillment and possession of Thaipusam as
deeply ethical practices. Her well-argued case represents a fresh
perspective that supplements the usual functionalist approaches
without denying them.
Spirits in Culture,History, andMind (1996), edited by Jeannette
Marie Mageo and Alan Howard, is a collection of eleven articles of
generally very high quality, most by anthropologists, that bring a
variety of approachesto the relation of spirit possession and history
in the islands of the Pacific Basin. The various authors situate their
studies in Samoa,Tonga, Nukulaelae (Tuvalu),Anuta (Solomon Is-
lands), Rotuma (Fiji), Dadul (Papua New Guinea), Chuuk (Feder-
ated States of Micronesia),and South Sulawesi (Indonesia). (Fortu-
nately, the editors provide a map of the Pacific Basin, without which
this reader, at least, would have been at sea.) The aim of the collec-
tion “is to examine the changing roles that gods and spirits have
played in various cultures,relating them on the one hand to specific
historical and cultural contexts, and on the other to cultural and psy-
chological universals” (2). Michael Lambek, who radically denies
to gods and spirits the possibility of existential reality except as
productsof culturally conditioned imagination,focuses exclusively
on the power of possessionto articulate cultural experiencesymbol-
ically-“Spirits are products of imagination, partial world con-
structions that are fictional but not simply fictitious” (238). In his
“Afterword,” he gives his reading of the book’s achievement: this
collection of articles does not approach spirits from psychological,
structural, and aesthetic perspectives but “contributes importantly
to a comparative reassessment of the link between history and the
religious imagination” (24 1).
Regardless of how the contributois evaluate the intent and suc-
cess of the volume, I will say emphatically that the lead article,
“Gods, Spirits, and History: A Theoretical Perspective,” by Robert
I. Levy, Mageo, and Howard (1 1-27), should be required reading
for anyone undertaking work on possession.12 Among the issues
that Levy et al. discuss is the difference between gods and spirits.
While admittedly this differs from culture to culture, their conclu-
sions are that gods represent and participate in mainstream morality
and social institutions, are mediated by high-status priests, are sub-
ject to manipulation through praise, supplication, and gift giving,
and are more distant from sensual and other kinds of personal expe-
rience, while spirits are inherently more dangerous, comparatively
free from the control of hegemonic institutions, mediated by people
of ordinary or low status, have the power to possess, enter or con-
taminate people, are more likely to engender disease and disorder,
and exist on the margins of human socialand epistemologicalorder.
While this makes good theoreticalsense-I have no doubt that these
are sensible and generally valid conclusions-in South Asia at
least, the region with which I am most familiar, such distinctions
cannot be so easily drawn. In South Asia, gods and spiritscoexist on
a barely perceptible sliding scale; many recognized gods and god-
desses have priests of low status and the power to possess, and the
spirit world is closer to the center of moral and epistemologicalor-
der than most researchers have hitherto admitted. In certain places,
even spirits identified by the vocabulary of Sanskritic tradition as
exclusively malevolent, such as rZkasus or “demons,” bhfitus or
“ghosts,” and p i k a s or “flesh-eating spirits,” are coopted into
mainstream religious practice by brahman priesthoods. In South
Asia, as in the islands of the Pacific Basin, gods and spirits partici-
pate more or less equally in social structure, personhood, personal
experience, and morality, regardless of the ways in which they are
themselves constructed or imagined.
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
Levy et al. identify possession as “a culturally crafted coping be-
havior” (18) that places the individual possessed in a locus of
power. They maintain that two conditions are necessary for posses-
sion to flourish: “people who are psychologicallydisposed to disso-
ciation, and a cultural environment that makes conventional use of
possession episodes” (19). They observe, as do most of the authors
in the volume, that women are more liable to possession (reaffirm-
ing Lewis’s observation) and that possession experience increases
during times of social stress and disorder (21). Two topics recur
through many of the articles: the effects of modernity on belief in
spirits and on possession, particularly in relation to the modifying
influence of modernity on performance modes, and the effects of
Christianity. On many of the islands, possession has decreased as
the pressures of both modernization and Christianity have altered
lifestyles (e.g., Howard, “Speak of the Devils: Discourseand Belief
in Spirits on Rotuma,” 121-45). In other cases, however, the link is
absent. Lambek writes, “One might wish to see a causal or logical
connection between the increasing fetishization of commodities
and the depersonalizationof spirits, yet the present volume demon-
strates that this would be too neat; Pacific spirits sometimes prosper
in modernity” (245). The Christian church, too, has not always been
effective in eradicating belief in local spirits. One example is the is-
land of Chuuk, which has been thoroughly Christianized. Although
possession there-a relic of pre-Christian times-appears now to
be overwhelmingly a female response to male a l c o h o l i ~ mit, ~is~
nevertheless“associated with Satan and the forces of evil at work in
the world” (Francis X.Hezel and Jay D. Dobbin, “Spirit Possession
in Chuuk,” 205). Catholic priests, including Hezel, are frequently
summoned to bless persons who are said to be possessed (200). In
other cases, the church has not even attempted to eradicate belief in
local spirits, as Richard Feinberg discovered on Anuta, an island a
half-mile in diameter with a total of about 250 residents, at the east-
ernmost end of the Solomon Islands (“Spirit Encounters on a Poly-
nesian Outlier,” 99-120). On this island, the adoption of Christian-
ity in the second decade of the twentieth century had the effect of
demoting the status of the local gods. It did not, however, affect be-
lief in local spirits, and spirit mediumship continues to flourish. In
summary. this volume is an important addition to the field of pos-
session studies.
As mentioned, two of the books under review focus on posses-
sion in Africa. One, The Possessed and the Dispossessed, by Lesley
A. Sharp, deals with women, migration, and power as frames for
both spirit possession and the construction of identity in the boom-
ing migrant town of Ambanja, in the Sambirano valley of northern
Madagascar.The other, Spirit Possession: Modernity and Power in
Africa, edited by Heike Behrend and Ute Luig from the University
of Cologne and the Free University of Berlin respectively, covers a
broad geographical range, with chapters on Madagascar (Sharp),
Uganda, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, Togo, the Swahili-speaking
areas of coastal Kenya and Tanzania, and the archipelago of Bijag6
in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Guinea-Bissau.One of the ex-
ceptional features of this volume is that many of the scholars are Eu-
ropean. Although all the articles are in English, their bibliographies
are excellent venues to the literature on possession in German and
French. which appears to be as unapproachable and mystifying as
possession itself to most of the best Anglophone anthropologists.
Sharp’s book, like Srinivas’s,is a deeply contextualized ethnog-
raphy of possession. The Malagasy word for the possession experi-
ence is tromba, which refers as well to the royal ancestral spirits of
the Sakalava (the ethnic group under study), the institution of pos-
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
session, and the spirit mediums themselves. Sharp, who is particu-
larly sensitive to issues of power and political agency, examines
possession as a mode of political consciousness embedded in reli-
gious experience.Possession among the Sakalava is highly formal-
ized, and spirits who are the agents of oracular possession are often
part of a family inheritance.The personal identity and specificity of
visual representation of spirits is of great importancein Africa. (Not
only is lineage important, but so is appearance. Thus, Sharp ob-
serves that a “medium who has inherited her mother’s spirits will
also inherit the spirits’ clothes” [ 1481.)The identification and nam-
ing of spirits is clearly a strategy for controlling them. Spirits often
bear the names of grandparents or long-deceased rulers or local
chieftains. This naming provides a further link with the local cul-
ture, as well as with the land itself; the authority of these spirits is
important in the assertion of local land rights and autonomy.
With the rise of “Malagasization”in the postcolonialperiod (fol-
lowing a revolt against the French in 1947), tromba possession in-
creased, and the number and variety of rromba spirits expanded. It is
no accident,then, that the prestige and power of tromba spirits, sup-
pressed by the French, has been enhanced. Perhaps because tromba
rituals have been a primary instrumentfor preserving and interpret-
ing the history of the island, Malagasizationhas brought the rromba
spirits and institution closer to the centers of Malagasy political au-
thority and economic production. Indeed, the surprising power and
prestige of the female rromba spirit mediums have enabled them to
dictate the direction of national economic development projects.
One of Sharp’s observations is that contrary to dominant assump-
tions in anthropology, Sakalava possession is not necessarily a
province of the marginalized and weak. Although Malagasy women
are characterized as weak or soft, while men are regarded as strong
or hard, it is the women who, through their spirit voices, determine
the pace and organizationof the culture. In this case at least, Lewis’s
argument that possession is linked to low status and marginality
does not hold, as mediumship is associated with marriage and moth-
erhood, and the possessedwield considerablepower. Tromba medi-
ums are also widely consulted healers, who appear to have an ami-
cable and respectful relationship with other medical practitioners
on the island.
Tromba are not the only spirits on Madagascar.There is another
categoryof volatile and unpredictable spirits (njarininrsy)responsi-
ble for negative, unwanted possession, as well as for mass posses-
sion, largely of adolescent migrant girls, in the public schools
(222ff.). In one instance documented by Sharp, a powerful healer
(mousy) was consulted. He reported that the local ancestors were
angry because the French paid no regard to the sacrednessof the an-
cestral ground on which the school was built, moving and destroy-
ing tombs. The healer recommended the performance on the school
grounds of a ceremony honoring the deceased ancestors, including
the sacrifice of an ox. Following this performance, the possession
diminishedconsiderably.Like Spirits in Culture,History, and Mind
and Spirit Possession: Modernity and Power in Africa, this book
addresses the topic of the local interface of possession and Chris-
tianity (245-75). The Protestant church is dominant in much of
Madagascar and has highly developed forms of healing rituals and
exorcisms, even sponsoring exorcism retreats. Sharp has demon-
strated that the clientele, whom she calls the dispossessed, consists
to a great extent of those who cannot cope with either the status or
the multilayered identity of the Sakalava defined through the domi-
nant institution of tromba mediumship.
Spirit Possession: Modernity and Power in Africa is the product
of anthropologists who share the same social-scientificconcerns as
the contributors to Spirits in Culture, History, and Mind. This does
not mean, however, that possession is constituted identically in Af-
rica and Oceania. While oracular possession and spirit healing are
common to both, in Africa there appears to be greater concern with
matters of purity of the individual in possession, contextualizingthe
spirit in local history, specific spirit identification, and attending to
the “personal” needs of spirits (cigarettes,alcohol, clothes, etc.). In
addition, to generalize Sharp’s observations on Madagascar, much
current possession is of members of the educated elite, regardlessof
their formal religious affiliations. Much of the possession recorded
in Africa during the first half of the twentieth century was of the dis-
enfranchised or marginalized and expressed their travails. Since
then, however, many of the same possession cults flourish under
changed circumstances:the mediums and groups under study are no
longer marginalized but have become more central in the political
and economic structures of their respective countries. Unlike what
might have been expected given the prevailing anthropologicalthe-
ories of Lewis and others several decades ago, spirit possession has
not abated; if anything, it has increased. Indeed, the spirits in Africa
are more politically engaged than those in the South Pacific where
the possessed are still comparatively marginalized. In Africa, how-
ever, the spirit world is as fully and diversely populated as the hu-
man world-and just as conflictual.
On the latter point, Adeline Masquelier writes of a recent spiritist
movement in the Hausa-speaking areas of Niger in which spirits by
the name of Dodo attempt, through their mediums (or is it the medi-
ums through their spirits?), to enforce an anti-Western cultural
ethos (“The Invention of Anti-Tradition: Dodo Spirits in Southern
Niger,” 34-49). This conservative movement maintains that the
commodities of modem consumer culture are corrupting and turn
people away from their traditional engagement with the spirit
world. Thus, certain products such as cars and tape recorders, which
for the Dodo mediums represent “the grizzly [sic] world of consum-
ers and commodities” (44), are shunned. The principle on which
this is based, notes Masquelier, is that “[elveryone involved with
spirits knows the corrosive effects of money which only eats away
the ties woven long ago between spirits and people” (43). The driv-
ing force of this Dodo movement, however, is a conviction that the
prevailing spirit culture, which is characterized by possession by
deities called bori, has become corrupted by the evils of modernity.
The popularity of this movement, newly invented tradition, or
“anti-tradition’’ has capitalized on idealized notions of the tradi-
tional and a nationalism purified of remnants of a colonial past that
infected even the local deities.
All the articles in this volume are worth reading and reflecting
on, but because of limitations of space 1 will comment on only one
more article, “Power to Heal, Power to Kill: Spirit Possession and
War in Northern Uganda (1986- 1994).” Heike Behrend acknowl-
edges that study is grounded in a new subdiscipline, the anthropol-
ogy of war, “which not only deals with ‘traditional’ warfare but,
above all, tries to understand the recent modem or postmodern wars
in their global and local contexts” (20). Behrend attempts to “recon-
struct a history of spirits and spirit possession in Acholi, Northern
Uganda, with special reference to the ambivalence of healing and
killing inherent in the various discourses on power” (21). With this
in mind, Behrend discusses various Holy Spirit Movements and the
“construction of difference concerning spirit possession” (2 1) in
three of them. With the introduction of Christianity in the early
210 / Religious Studies Review
years of the twentieth century, many local spirits (jogi) were
stripped of their polyvalenceand painted as demonic and diabolical,
subdued under the one Christian God. Nevertheless, not only was
Acholi religion Christianized,but Christianity was Acholized. One
of the facets of this was the increasing importance of the Christian
Holy Spirit, which fragmented into a plurality of holy spirits. These
new spirits opposed the old order ofjogi as pagan, and eventually a
new hierarchy developed.The most important messenger of this hi-
erarchy was Alice Auma, who, aided by an Italian spirit named
Lakwena whose discourse was one of Christian morality, was in-
strumentalin a coup that overthrewthe presidentof Uganda, Milton
Obote, in July 1985and installed an Acholi, Tito Okello, as the new
president. Okello’sgovernmentwas generally unpopular,however,
and the country descended into a brutal civil war. Alice Auma
founded an army called the “Holy Spirit Mobile Forces” (HSMF),
directed by Lakwena. Followinghim in the chain of command were
an American spirit called Wrong Element, who was responsible for
intelligence operations; a kindly and respected spirit from Zaire
named Franko, who directed the food supply; and a Korean spirit
named Ching Poh, who was responsible for weapons supply and
transport. In all, reports Behrend, besides Holy Spirit soldiers,
140,000 spirits fought for the HSMF. Responsible for the killing
were certain Arabic spirits named Kassim, Mohammed, Miriam,
Medina, and Ali Shila, while the Christian spirit Jeremiah and the
indigenous spirit Nyaker were responsible for healing. Everyone,
so the ideology went, was free to be possessed, but in general spirit
possession involved the duty to kill.
In October 1987,Alice’s army was defeated and she was exiled
to Kenya. Her spiritual successor was a school dropout from the
same region of Uganda named Joseph Kony. He claimed to be a
cousin of Alice’s and developedhis own hierarchy of Christian and
non-Christian spirits, eventually combining Westem military tech-
niques with indigenousritual practices. Like Alice, Kony taught his
followersthat they were protected from bullets by angels. Also, like
Alice, he employed his spirits for healing and killing. I first read
about Joseph Kony three years ago in the New Yorker (Rubin 1998),
in a story that detailed how he directed the horrific and brutal mur-
ders and kidnappings of young Ugandan schoolgirls from his out-
post in neighboring southern Sudan. Kony remains at large today.
Perhaps what is most striking about Behrend’s article is that it pro-
vides much needed backgroundto the activities of Joseph Kony and
to the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandmentsof
God, which was responsible for the killings of at least 924 followers
between late February and mid-March of 2000. In the end, Behrend
concludes, attempts to heal Ugandan society and reconstitute moral
order through spirit mediumship devolved into killing in part be-
cause of the disenfranchisement of indigenous religion. This is a
very complex story, which Behrend concludes by noting that “the
Christianspirits’ attempt to create a new moral space without witch-
craft and sorcery failed” (31).
Lest anyone idly think that possession is a phenomenon limited
to antiquity and contemporary non-western societies and that pos-
session studies are strictly the property of scholars, mostly anthro-
pologists, who conduct research on exotic peoples in far-flung
places, Michael F. Brown has written The Channeling Zone: Ameri-
can Spirituality in an Anxious Age (1997). a book that covers pos-
session’s modem American cognate-trance channeling. Like
spirit possession elsewhere in the world, the primary observed char-
acteristics of channeling are sharp changes in expressive behavior
accompanied by identity shifts.Trance channelingcan be viewed in
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
the same terms as the possession phenomena described by Sharp in
Madagascar,Srinivas in Ladakh, or any one of a number of studies
reviewed here-as a multiple personality experience framed by rit-
ual and performance, which confer on it cultural legitimacy and re-
move it from the arenas of danger and pathology.
The culture of New Age trance channeling may be positively
compared to that of spirit mediumship in developing countries. In
America and elsewhere in the West, workshops on contacting spirit
guides and guardian angels are commonly held, all in search of “the
primal experience of transformation” (Melton et al., xiii). This is a
New Age cognate to the spirit initiations and apprenticeshipsfound
in, for example, Oceania and South Asia. In the West, channeling is
thought of in terms of personal growth or spiritual evolution. These
are subcultural cognates of the self-empowerment identified in
other cultures of possession. In the West, as in Africa, South Asia,
or Oceania, such empowerment is legitimated by an amicable rela-
tionship of discourse to the dominant sociopolitical cultures, mean-
ing that the dominant culture has, by necessity, created recognizable
and tacitly accepted outlets for alternative experience and expres-
sion.
Another point of comparison is that of spirit ownership. Democ-
racy is not always a feature of possession. In a few culturally deter-
mined circumstances, one individual obtains an exclusive right to
possession, such as Alice Auma of the spirit Lakwena. But this does
not appear to be the norm; in most cases deities and spirits are capa-
ble of having multiple hosts. In the West, however, where channel-
ing is big business, serious issues of intellectual property rights
have arisen. On more than one occasion,channelers have resorted to
copyright law in order to ensure their ownership of a certain spirit.
The copyright issue is fraught with conflict for channelers, as it op-
poses the peculiar Western populism that serves their spiritual and
economicinterests. The obviousproblem here, and one that appears
resistant to solution, is that spirits cannot be brought under legal
contract. This has led Brown to conclude that channeling will even-
tually enter the cultural mainstream in other areas of the personal
growth and alternative healing movements. Although trance
channelers depict themselves as an exclusive breed apart from soci-
ety, their teachings contain a reformist message that places them
squarely within the accepted range of Western social and religious
dynamics. As Brown puts it, “channeling has a democratic under-
current that subverts centralized power” (130). Yet this undercur-
rent has an ameliorating, rather than an alienating, edge to its sub-
version. As is the case with most of the literature on possession
reviewed here, it is a subversion that does not seriously threaten the
dominant order but rather provides new rationale for the old moral
and social order. This is consistent with observations of
ethnographers on spirit mediumship as a subculture within more
canonically controlled Christian, Buddhist, or Hindu mainstreams.
Consistent with possessionreported elsewhere, channeling is an in-
creasingly middle-class phenomenon. A demographic profile re-
veals the preponderance of channelers to be white, well-educated,
economically secure Baby Boomers. Furthermore, as with posses-
sion elsewhere, most channelers are women who “are free to assert
religious authority and to experience a liberating androgyny” (182).
Brown asserts that like its historical antecedents (and, I might add,
akin to its cross-cultural cognates) channeling depicts contempo-
rary anxieties about central themes and tensions in Western culture.
Also like possession in other cultures, New Age trance channeling
serves the ends of physical, emotional, and social healing in innova-
tive but not revolutionary ways.
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
Trance channeling,however, differs from certain modes of clas-
sical possession in two ways. First, the usual purpose of channeling
is oracular, to give advice or predict the future, usually in glowing
salvific terms. In South Asia, for example, information, generally
about the past, is transmittedthrough possession, but as often as not
the purpose of possession (at least positive possession) as reported
by those possessed (rather than by anthropologists)is possession it-
self, the mere fact of manifesting and expressing the personality of
the deity or spirit. Second, the emotional trajectory of trance chan-
neling usually differs from that found in ethnographies of posses-
sion. African or South Asian possession is often accompanied by
acts of violence, for example, in possession by a goddess who
drinks blood or an ancestor who demands an animal sacrifice. In
New Age trance channeling,on the other hand, the experience is in-
variably one of transmitting soothing words of well-worn wisdom,
with little emotive range in the expressive state of the channeler.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of possession is that the ef-
facement of individual personality, rather than its normative mani-
festation, should be empowering.Loss of active control, loss of rec-
ognizable personality,and submersionof personal ego and identity
are symptoms of pathology in all systems of medical analysis. Un-
der these specialcircumstances,however, they are empoweringand
thus attractive-even compelling-forms of expression. As such,
they are regarded as the very antithesis of pathology-as symptoms
of sound, even exalted, psychic and spiritual health. This is consis-
tent, one might even say radically consistent, with dominant reli-
gious belief completesubmersionof the individualinto the identity
of a perceived higher (or even lower) power. In many mainstream
religions, dispassion and ego dissolution are understood as keys to
heaven or enlightenment.In other words, effacement of individual
personality within a religious or spiritual context is in keeping with
the most fundamental notions of individual and, consequently, so-
cial power in most of these cultures.
1,fear that I have not done justice to the material presented in
these richly detailed books. Unfortunately, thin strands of these
broad, thick descriptions and theoretical discussions are all that the
scope of a review essay will allow. Fortunately, these books are rel-
atively free of jargon, thus intellectually accessible to most general
readers. Brown writes that “[tlhe academic mind, whether of scien-
tific or humanist persuasion, thrives on distinctions and particulars,
whereas New Age thought seeks connections and universals, which
are pursued with an enthusiastic holism that disorients thinkers
trained in highly specialized disciplines” (10). The will to holism
could as well apply to “traditional” thought, in which the “radical
fluidity” of the self, to take a phrase from Robert Jay Lifton,14seeks
identification in an array of notions, ideas, and entities that
cross-pollinate,producing configurations of personal identity that
both reflect and drive deep cultural structures and modalities. Re-
gardless of the extent to which different scientific or humanist read-
ers would be willing to subscribe to the variety of emic notions of
the existential reality of deities and spirits to which a constructed
self could conceivably and radically flow, these books will surely
stimulate one to think and consider the complex interactions be-
tween self, other, and society in new and different ways.
Notes
I. See recent discussions (Griffin2000, Preus 2000. and Segal1992,2000)of the
distinction between interpretation and explanation.
2. Cf. Linda L. Giles, “SpiritPossession & the SymbolicConstructionof Swahili
Society,” in Behrend and Luig 1999. 142-43.
Religiom studies Review / 211
3. With respect to South Asia, see Emdl 1993and Biardeau 1989. and for China,
see Paper 1995.
4. See my forthcoming book, Friendly Acquisitions, Hostile Takeovers: Deify
and Spirit Possession in Classical Indian Literature and Civilization.
5. The first to level this criticism was Handelman (1974) in an early review of the
book.
6. See also the extraordinary(and virtually unrecognized)study by Win (1954).
This work recognizes in twentieth-centuryCeylon some of the possessing “seizers”
(graha) that occur in the classical Indian medical literature, especially the .aka.
yaksa, and preta.
7. Sharpprovides an excellentsummary of anthropologicalperspectives on pos-
session, 14ff.
8. The study of possession in classical and medieval China has been greatly ad-
vanced by the recent work of Edward Davis (2001). This volume seeks to free. pos-
session from its “shhanic substrate” and brings it to the forefront of Chinese
religious practice. In this sense it is in agreement with Paper. Besides Davis’s vol-
ume, the most solid Sinologicalstudies bearing on possession are Strickmann 1993
and 1996 (chapters4-5).
9. Examples abound in South Asia. Possession as a mode of devotion is noted
among men in popular Hinduism; see Stanley 1988, Sax 1991,Hiltebeitel1991,and
Haberman 1988.Haberman’s study illustratesthat in certain extremeformsof Hindu
devotionalism(bhakti)men renounce their masculinity and seek to become female.
On the latter point, also see Ramanujan 1986.In all of these cases, otheringis accom-
plished in the senseof forging a distinct separationof personal,social, and rhetorical
identities from those of their own ordinary social identities and those of others
around them who help define their social contexts.
10. Witness, for example, Castillo’s sharp indictment (1994a, 1994b) of
Obeyesebre (1977.1981) and Stanley and Ruth F d (1964). who Castillobelieves
forced their evidence to fit their theory, in this case repressed oedipal desire as the
primary causal factor in possession,for which Castillo sees no evidence whatsoever.
I do not intend here, however, to recklessly or perfunctorily dispatch Freud and his
many insights once and for all. For a collection of illuminatingarticles that both cri-
tique and utilize the psychoanalytic method productively, see Vaidyanathan and
Kripal 1999.
11. Paper notes that body piercing is a characteristic feature of possession
mediumship in southern and southeasternChina (1 18).
12. Two other important articles are Boddy 1994 and Lambek 1989.
13. This circumstanceis not mentioned in the relevant article. I am grateful to
Kate Dernbach, a Ph.D. candidatein the Department of Anthropology at the Univer-
sity of Iowa, for this information. Dernbach has conducted fieldwork on possession
in Chuuk.
14. Brown, 176. citing Lifton 1993.
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(eds.), Case Studies in Spirit Possession, 235-94. John
Textfiguren und 87 Abbildungen. Bern: Hans Huber,
Wiley & Sons. 1941.
198 1 Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Reli-
gious Experience. University of Chicago Press. WITTGENSTEIN,
LUDWIG
1984 The Cult of the Goddess Panini. University of Chicago 1979 Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Ed. Rush Rhees.
Press. Doncaster: Brynmill Press.
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001
RECENT ANTHROPOLOGICAL WORKS ON
SPIRIT POSSESSION
SPIRITS CAPTURED IN STONE: SHAMANISM AND
TRADITIONAL MEDICINE AMONG THE TAMAN OF
BORNEO
By Jay H. Bernstein
London: Boulder, 1997
Pp. xi + 207. Cloth, €39.95; paper, €15.95.
DANCING PROPHETS: MUSICAL EXPERIENCE IN
TUMBUKA HEALING
By Steven M. Friedson
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996
Pp. 239. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $16.95.
THE FEAST OF THE SORCERER: PRACTICES OF
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POWER
By Bruce Kapferer
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997
Pp. xix + 367. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $27.50.
SPIRITS IN CULTURE, HISTORY, AND MIND
Edited by J. M. Mageo and A. Howard
New York: Routledge, 1996
Pp. 282. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $20.99.
THE PERFORMANCE OF HEALING
Edited by Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman
New York: Routledge, 1996
Pp. 330. Cloth, $80.00; paper, $21.99.
IN THE REALM OF THE DIAMOND QUEEN:
MARGINALITY IN AN OUT-OF-THE-WAYPLACE
By Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993
Pp. xvi + 350. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $16.95.
THE HANDS FEEL I T HEALING AND SPIRIT
PRESENCE AMONG A NORTHERN ALASKAN PEOPLE
By Edith Turner
DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996
Pp. xxviii + 260. Cloth, $38.00; paper, $20.00.
Reviewer: Shail Mayaram
Institute of Development Studies
Jaipur, Rajasthan, India 302004
T
his set of books covers a vast canvas of experience variously
described as shamanism, spirit possession, sorcery, and heal-
ing. Religious experience of this type is not otherworldly in
orientation or concerned only with the transcendental; rather, its
concern is with the realm of desire and necessity, illness and
health-being in the world. The first part of this essay looks at
shared themes, perspectives, debates, and issues in this field of
study; the second part examines the individual works.
Themes and Perspectives
Over the last two decades there has been a vast expansion in the dis-
cipline of medical anthropology.As Laderman points out, the field proach to “high and folk religions” with gods and spirits treated on a
has moved from mere adjunct status into becoming the anthropo-
Religious Studies Review / 213
logical mainstream (in Laderman and Roseman 1996). Several
theoretical developments have been responsible for this shift, in-
cluding the extensive work now being done on shamanism and
spirit possession.
Contributions by Levy, Mageo, and Howard to Spirits in Cul-
ture, History, and Mind (1996) point out that possession was once
interpreted as pathology and an aspect of the schizophrenicperson-
ality. It was called dissociation by psychiatristsat the turn of the last
century (18). What occurs in contexts of possession is now seen by
scholars not as a loss of self but an expansion of the self. Levy et al.
maintain that possession needs to be viewed more as a skillful com-
municativeact and as culturally crafted coping behavior. Mageo de-
scribes it as a system of highly dynamic communication that re-
sponds to local needs and power configurations. As Lambek (in
Mageo and Howard) points out, embodiment has to do with trance,
but also with voice. In the same volume, Hezel and Dobbin, as well
as Besnier, bring out the heteroglossic quality of spirit discourse,
the shiftingregister of voices. Recent scholarship is bringing out the
creativity implicit in shamanistickpirit discourse.
Another current trend is to study spirit possession in a
cross-cultural,comparative perspective. Thus, issues of the cultural
treatment of ill health become points of entry to larger questions of
thought and action. Even as spirits and shamans assume myriad
forms, there is an attempt to identify the universal within the speci-
ficity of the local. Most of the writers under review critique the evo-
lutionist, progressivistassumptions of earlier works. As Mageo and
Howard forcefully note, gods and spirits have been seen as repre-
senting the historical and folk religions, respectively. While spirits
have proliferated in ethnographies, they have tended to vanish,
spiritlike, in texts on comparative religion. The major sociological
theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber focused on gods rather
than spirits,thereby exiling spirits to the margins of human experi-
ence, rendering them more as results of psychological aberration
than culturally understandable constructs. “But spirits as well as
gods perform vital social, cultural, and psychologicaltasks for peo-
ple occupyingan uncertain world,” Mageo and Howardcounter(3).
Mageo and Howard go on to make the significant point that the
god-based historical religions have been associated with the politi-
cal form of states, with rationality and recorded histories, unlike the
so-called prerational folk religions. They affirm the point made ear-
lier by Brian Moms that state-associated religions are treated by
scholars as conceptual entities,while folk religions of tribal cultures
are dismembered and seen as collages of unrelated parts. In this
piecemeal treatment, spirit possession, witchcraft, myth, and sym-
bolism are viewed as autonomous sets of beliefs, independent of
other aspects of culture (Moms, cited in Howard and Mageo, 1).
The editors might have pushed the more forceful point that for many
scholars folk “religion” does not even qualify qua religion. Indeed,
religion was often seen as the “other” of spirits (Laderman, in
Laderman and Roseman). Believers in the latter were significantly
classified as “people without religion.” The category of religion is,
however, used somewhat unquestioningly by Mageo and Howard,
who might have taken more serious cognizance of recent debate on
the term (see Asad 1993 and Smith 1991). Moreover, if religion,
state, and history constitute parallel and related historical processes,
one can see how folk, oral, and politically segmentary forms were
constituted as counterpoints of “non-progress” by anthropologists
and historians; but once again the editors do not push the point.
Mageo and Howard stress instead an alternative “equitable”a p
214 / Religiow Studies Review
continuum. Their concern to restore spirits to their rightful place in
theories of religion would best be described as remedial rather than
radical. Mageo and Howard highlight the mistaken older assump-
tion that science and civilization would erode the presence of reli-
gion and spirits. Evolutionist-oriented writers had believed that
spirits would give way to gods as historical religions evolved out of
folk beliefs in the civilizing process. Modem cultures, however, at-
test the simultaneityof folk beliefs and gods along with science. In-
deed, spirits and shamans are found among people of most reli-
gions, whether Buddhist, Christian,Hindu, or Muslim (Goodman et
al. 1974, Cavendish 1975, Lambek 1981, Tambiah 1970). I will re-
turn to the question of the role of spirits in Christianity.
Kapferer (1997) makes the cogent point that anthropological in-
terest in sorcery and magic was contemporary with Western expan-
sion and colonization.Given the prevalence of Darwinism, sorcery
and magic became derogatory terms that legitimized the domina-
tion of the West over other societies, the sites of unreason. Early an-
thropologistslike Frazer and Tylor saw sorcery as an expression of
the awe of human beings confronted by the terrifying magnitude of
the universe. Such fear was assumed to be overcome with the rise of
religion and science. Kapferer points out that this orientation to sor-
cery has continued implicitly, for instance, in Durkheim and
Mauss’s distinction between the sacred and the profane (10). Like
Kapferer, Mageo and Howard strongly reject the evolutionist as-
sumptions and progressivism of Enlightenment thinkers such as
Spencer,Tylor, and Frazer. They, nonetheless, would like to follow
the early evolutionists’ example in developing cross-culturally
valid generalizations.These writers assert the validity of a compar-
ative, universalist project in the anthropology of religion when
emancipated from the ethnocentrism of earlier writers.
Spirits in Culture, History, and Mind consists of a series of con-
tributions representing different perspectives necessary to a
cross-cultural understanding of contemporary religion. The ques-
tion the volume raises is not the validity of the exercise but whether
the goal is fulfilled by an ethnographic treatment of spirits derived
primarily from case studies of the Pacific basin, particularly since
spirits in this region are said to have retreated “to the shadows.”
The titles under review cumulatively suggest the diverse ap-
proaches that have been and are being used to understand posses-
sion as well as the ways the field of interpretive anthropology has
been slowly constituted. Early writings such as Evans-Pritchard’s
work on the Azande (1937) and Elizabeth Colson’s on the Tonga
(1969) saw spirit possession in terms of functionalism. I. M.
Lewis’s deprivationtheory (1971) saw it as a reaction to oppressive
social structure. Since spirit possession exists at the interface of so-
ciology and psychology, considerable research was devoted to the
psychoanalytic sources of possession, including, for instance, the
work of Obeyesekere (1981) and the “ethnopsychiatric” perspec-
tive of Crapanzano (1973).
Building on Milton Singer’s work there was a performative turn
manifest in the work of the (until then) symbolic anthropologist
Victor Turner. Healing came to be viewed as cultural performance
and social drama (Turner 1996). The episode of illness is seen here
as a framed event standing out from everyday life; the expressionof
symptoms prepares the ground for therapeutic intervention that
may lead to healing. This approach was further developed by
Kapferer’s work on exorcism in Sri Lanka (1983). The Perfor-
mance of Healing builds on this perspective, foregroundingthe role
of sense experience in health. Laderman and Roseman highlight the
use of multiple media, the importance of body movement, props,
Volume 27 Number 3 / Jidy 2001
costume, fragrance, and sounds such as rhythmic drumming.
Laderman refers to this as the aesthetics and “poetics” of healing.
She also emphasizes sociolinguistics, building on the work of
Bauman, Jakobson, and others who looked at language use in social
interaction. Performance here is seen as genre rather than event (in
which the text and context are mutually constitutive).
The performative approach, however, raises the question under
what conditions ritual is not a social drama. Obeyesekere critiques
the anthropological use of the theatrical model: “there is a sufferer
or patient, not an actor; there is a priest, not a director; there is a con-
gregation, not an audience....Pain and suffering are easy enough to
eliminate from the model, but not from life” (1990,288). Even dy-
ing is sometimes seen as medical performance (Biesele and Da-
vis-Floyd, in Laderman and Roseman).
The work of Friedson (1996) rectifies the lack of attention paid
to music in approaches to ritual healing and demonstrates that
throughout Africa musical experience is central. Among the
Tumbuka-speakingpeoples of northern Malawi, as Friedson points
out, ritual healing does not disaggregate medical care and the aes-
thetic experience as is the case with Western medical systems.
Healing is an art form of which music is a core experience, even a
“root paradigm.” Friedson is critical of the large body of work on
spirit possession in which musical experience is treated as
epiphenomenon and so relegated to the secondary realm of art. He
observes that Turner’s work on ritual media, ironically titled Drums
of Afliction, says nothing about drumming. Any focus on music,
Friedson asserts, is similarly absent in Kapferer’s work on Sinha-
lese exorcism, even though deities and demons are both constituted
by the music and dance of exorcism. Musical experience is the
structural nexus where healer, patient, and spirit meet. Music,
trance, and healing are therefore related in generating an intensity of
experience that is central to the clinical setting. Although
Friedson’s ethnographyis a valuable corrective, it does not raise the
counterquestionabout healing without the use of music and dance.
Another approach derives from experiential anthropology’sem-
phasis on embodiment and experience. Significantly, a large num-
ber of anthropologist-participants have actually experienced pos-
session or witchcraft themselves. This includes Peters (1981) and
Desjarlais (1992), who underwent the shamanic trance in Nepal;
Evans-Pritchard (1937), who is said to have seen the spirit light
among the Azande; Stoller (in Laderman and Roseman) and Bowen
(1954). who experienced witchcraft; and Friedson, who danced the
vimbuza spirits. Female anthropologists’ propensity to experiences
involvingpossession has been observed; in the books under review,
we have Carol Laderman’s experiential descriptions of the spirit
wind of the Malays (1988, 1991) and Edith Turner’s spirit experi-
ences in Alaska (1996). Not surprisingly, Edith Turner builds on her
mentor Victor Turner’s anthropology of experience (1986). which
upheld the primacy of experience over objectified mind manifest in
laws and culture. She reiterates his position that only through
co-experiencing the ritual process with the enactors does one be-
come aware of the communirus in social structure. She identifies
herself with an anthropological tradition that derives its lineage
from Bakhtin, specifically his work on dialogics that, according to
her, asserts the primacy of the people.
. Phenomenology is a particular favorite of such writers as
Friedson and Kapferer. Friedson sees it as reflexive engagement
with things rhemselves (3). Locating the changing nature of the
trance within the experience of nchimi healers turns the investiga-
tion into a phenomenological one rather than a simple objective
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001
analysis. Phenomenological inquiry, in Friedson’s words, is into
“that which is given. In the temple of a Tumbuka healer, that which
is given first is musical experience” (29). Phenomenologically,the
vimbuza spirits are the things themselves. Kapferer defines phe-
nomenology as “a method whereby the human processes involved
in the formationsof human construction comprising the realities of
the life worlds of human being are revealed” (1997, xvi). He ac-
knowledges the phenomenological resonances in Hindu and Bud-
dhist thought. The emphasisof his new work on practice signifies an
elaboration of his older performance orientation (1983). Laderman
likewise stresses the importance of understanding healing systems
from within, from the perspectives of the healer and the patients
(1996). One wonders, however, whether phenomenological inquiry
really marks a departure from the anthropology of experience.
Friedson, for instance, elaborates on “doing phenomenology,”
which, in this case, means to enter into the possibilities of drum-
ming spirits (140).
Regrettably, while there is a greater emphasis on discourse and
the aestheticsof possession, there has been less considerationof the
sources of possession. Also missing is an inquiry into the social
structural, psychological, and physiological theories that marked
the early debates on possession. Bernstein’s Spirits Captured in
Stone: Shamanism and Traditional Medicine among the Taman of
Borneo (1997) is exceptional in using a combination of social orga-
nization and psychological approaches. Taking a position against
the adequacy of Lewis’s focus on structural conflict, Bernstein ar-
gues that the addition of a psychological perspective will provide
insight into the subjective, interior side of identity. Within the psy-
choanalytic model, “projection, dissociation, and somatization are
particular mechanisms for defending the ego in repressing thoughts
or desires that create anxiety” (9).
Possession is no static phenomenon; appropriately, several of
our writers focus on historicizing it to show the changes that occur
thro,ugh time (Lambek, in Mageo and Howard). Several works raise
the question of the transformationin spirit possession under the im-
pact of colonialism. Turner (1996) describes the consequences of
white contact in the nineteenthcentury, which led in various areas to
the undermining of livelihoods and the decimation of the whale and
human populationsthrough starvation,epidemics, and the introduc-
tion of addictive substances. Of particular interest has been the
question of how spirit discourse responded to colonialism and to
Chqstianity. Taussig (1987) points out the opposition between en-
lightenment and enchantment. Do spirits retreat with modernity?
While this seems to be the case in the Pacific Islands and among the
Taman of Borneo, it has not been so in African and Latin American
cultures. Interestingly, shamanism has made a comeback in New
Age movements, as Bernstein points out, since it eschews Cartesian
mind/body dualism, uses altered states of consciousness, and culti-
vates internalpowers that are believed to enhancepersonal growth.
Indeed, Taussig’s own work shows how shamanism constitutes
a creative and oppositional site against the violence of colonialism.
Among the Inupiat of Alaska, Christianity replaced the idea of the
whale as the source of initiative and spirit awarenessamong human
beings with the notion of a “God” who is the ruler of the whale and
all things. Yet spirits continue to reverberate through the Inupiat
world, as Turnerdemonstrates.Mageo describesthe transformation
of Samoan spirits under the impact of Christianity, demonstrating
how young women in Christian Samoa use involuntary possession
to resist the social morality associated with missionization. Not
Religious Studies Review / 215
only does Christianity not displace older forms of belief and prac-
tice, Christianity itself is transformed (Mageo and Howard, 3).
Spirits relate not only to the transcendental and the therapeutic
but also to the political realm. The capacity of spirits to affect hu-
man lives leads to a consideration of power, hegemony, and their
critique. Most recent research shows how spirit discourse is related
to power. Atkinson’s work among the Wana of Indonesia sees sha-
manism as an instrument of political authority (1989). Tsing like-
wise stresses how shamans “understand power, whether the vio-
lence of the military, the ritual of administration, or the magic of
religion. They combine authoritative knowledge, articulateness,
and the ability to draw an audience; they are thus leaders” (1993,
230-31).
An earlier formulationsaw gods as representingorder and spirits
as representing resistance. This paradigm now needs to be qualified
as both can reverse roles. In certain contexts, spirit possession
seems to reproduce hegemony and hierarchy (Taussig 1987.
Prakash 1986, Mageo and Howard 1996, Laderman 1996); gods
and goddesses, on the other hand, can sometimes be
countercultural. Bernstein points out that the healing practices of
the Taman balien have nothing to do with social protest or criticism,
given their relatively egalitarian society. Mageo argues that al-
though possession suggests rites of reversal and counterhegemonic
discourse, it may actually subvert resistance in the act of promoting
it (3 1,52). Atkinson’s reminder of the importanceof speakingabout
shamanismsin the plural and in terms of multiplicity is pertinent in
this respect (1992). Lambek likewise highlights the diversity of
spirits and variety of practices (in Mageo and Howard).
Spirits provide a commentaryon authority, morality,and sexual-
ity. Thus, issues of spirit discourse and resistance open up the ques-
tion of gender. Lewis’s classic work (1971, 1989) first articulated
shamanism and possession as resistance, describing women’s pos-
session cults as “thinly disguised protest movements” and an aspect
of sex wars in traditional societies. Possession is thus an oblique but
deliberate strategy used to express dissatisfaction with social norms
and to acquire power, status, economic security, or other material
gains. Thus, the voice of a deceased ancestor can function as re-
proach, challenging social structure and power relations. In the
South Asian rural context,possession by a woman from the village,
who is a sis or mother-in-law in kin terms, can lead to the victim
reprimanding and even cursing her own husband and senior affines
such as the brother-in-law.This is often identified as a hysteric con-
dition in which patients’ outburstsare understoodas caused by alien
forces (Shapiro, cited in Bernstein, 83). In this context, possession
helps women articulate anger, resentment, and frustration. It ex-
poses the silence of social suffering.
Certainly, women make up the large majority of persons who
suffer from involuntary possession in different cultures. They are
also known to be prone to hysteria (Bernstein, Kaull999). In earlier
periods of history, possession was delegitimized, and women con-
sidered witches were persecuted. Claims by some scholars that
women universally predominate as healers may be exaggerated
(Gordon,in Mageo and Howard, 74). Remember the significantcat-
egory of “medicine man”! Among significant exceptions are the
practitioners of the Taman balien tradition, 90 percent of whom are
women.’ This is possibly because the healing ritual culminates in
the transformation of the patient into a balien. Taman women’s
chronic illness is treated as spirit affliction fit for balien treatment.
Thus. most patients. who are in any case women. . h o m epractitio-
ners. Bernstein points out that Lewis’s hypothesisof the prevalence
216 / Religious Studies Review
of spirit possession in rigidly patriarchal societies does not explain
the predominance of women in this case. The primal figure of the
Taman balien tradition is an ancestral goddess,but one may wonder
if the mere predominanceof goddesses should be read as signifying
a nonpatriarchal religion.
Victor Turner saw ritual possession among Ndembu women in
terms of the structural conflict between matrilineality and
patrilocality(1968). His approach is followed by Gordon (in Mageo
and Howard). The Mageo and Howard collection shows that pos-
sessed women predominate in Chuuk, Samoa, and Tonga. This is
also the case in the Philippines,Malaysia, Trinidad,and a number of
other countries. Indeed, in Chuuk, possession has become a female
monopoly, viewed by Christianity as the work of Satan and the
forces of evil. Possession is seen as “dangerous because it repre-
sents a violent upheaval of the established social order. Possessed
women defy the canons that govern social conduct in Chuuk
women flaunt their sexuality in the presence of male relatives; they
voice publicly what ought to go unspoken” (Hezel and Dobbin, in
Mageo and Howard, 205). Hezel and Dobbin adopt a social struc-
tural explanation of possession in terms of family tensions and
women’s heightened experienceof social stress in contexts of mod-
ernization. Possession can lead to a temporary inversion of status
relationships, for instance, when a young woman demands that the
family halt their inappropriate or troubling behavior.
Spirit discourseis also a site forthe expressionof identity. Chris-
tian missionariesin Samoa viewed the young women’s night dance
called poulu as “obscene.” A new form of the tradition, however,
came into being that involved involuntary possession through
which young Samoan women expressed defiance of notions of
Christian respect, particularly sexual respect, on the grounds that
they were being victimized by spirits. Loosening the hair, for exam-
ple, was used as a mode of sexual expressiveness. Possession con-
texts thus articulate the suppressed self, as Obeyesekere has also
pointed out (198 1). The possessing spirit then is not so much the
“other” as an integral part of the self. The unspeakable is openly
spoken, kinship rules are flouted, ideas of respect, hierarchy, dis-
tance, and even gender are overturned. Mageo points out, however,
that the counterhegemonicdiscourse of such rites of reversal does
not preclude the reinforcement of hegemony.
There is considerable discussion in these works of the medical
aspects of healing2and the existence of plural systems of medicine.
Medical pluralism does not mean that choices are infinitely or
equally available to all but that there are different resolutions for a
range of problems. It suggests the availability of simultaneous and
hierarchical patterns of resort so that traditional and folk therapies
are in use simultaneously with modem systems (Kleinman 1988).
The response of the dominant (Western) system of medical care to
alternative systems has been largely one of hostility. The medical
practices of other cultures have had little impact yet on modem
medicine, but, as anthropologists point out, a biomedicine that is
trying to humanize itself could learn much from other conceptual
systems and practices (Biesele and Davis-Floyd, in Laderman and
Roseman, 316). particularly since these systems provide low-cost
and more effective treatments for mental illness.
A b a t deal of attention is paid to etiologies or theories of ill-
ness. Among the Malay, the wind is believed to carry many ghosts
(Bernstein). Imbalances in the human body occur with the increase
of heat and air brought about by spirit attacks (Laderman 1988,
1991, 1996). On Tonga and other Pacific Islands, illness is attrib-
uted to the intrusion of spirits into the living body (Gordon, in
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
Mageo and Howard, 62). Bernstein follows Kleinman in describing
bulien healing ceremonies as medical events that interpret illness.
Some illnesses are seen as externally caused and cannot be treated
with medicines or therapies. In Friedson’s account, the therapeutic
procedure is saturated with music. Laderman raises the question of
medical efficacy, hypothesizing that traditional healing methods
may trigger the placebo effect or the body’s ability to heal itself. In
the case of psychiatric healing, they possibly generate endorphins,
substances that have a tranquilizing effect on the nervous system.
Individual Ethnographies
Let us move now to a consideration of the ethnographies under re-
view. Bernstein’s Spirits Captured in Stone is about the therapeutic
practice of the Taman in Borneo, Indonesia, a small, formerly tribal
society of 4,500 persons consistingof Muslims, Christians, and ani-
mists. It deals with shamanism and spirits rather than possession,
since the balien are not spirit mediums. The Taman attribute illness
to spirits (demons, ghosts, and goblins) whose attacks harm the
soul, The bulien healing system consists of seven ceremonies that
include five or six distinct procedures-extraction of an intrusive
object, dance (soul travel to contact spirits), spirit conjuring, the
capture of spirits and lost souls, and their replacement. Bernstein’s
approachalso stresses material cultureand the use of such objects as
stones instead of medicines. Stones are believed to have magical
powers for curing others, retrieving spirits, and carrying the soul of
the bulien. The cosmology of the Taman identifies the individual
person with the corporeal body rather than the soul, of which each
person might have eight or so.
Central to the healing ritual is the transformation of the patient
into a healer. Bernstein uses the psychoanalytic concept of hysteria
to explain balien recruitment. Hysteria refers to psychoneuroticdis-
order that might includeeither dissociation (alteration in conscious-
ness and personal identity) or conversion (somatic and sensory dis-
turbances), or both. Psychoanalytic theory holds that the hysteric
expressesrepressed wishes, first in fantasy and then in bodily symp-
toms. Among the Taman, hysteria results in forms of spirit distur-
bance called pais luyu-layu (pining-away illness) or duwuwu julu
(captured by a being), often followed by sexually arousing dreams
or fantasies. The patient might feel an uncontrollable desire for the
person appearing in the dream and even experience seduction al-
though realizing that it is an apparition; hence, the dissociation of
one’s own will from the fantasy. Spirit disturbance is distinguished
from spirit attack motivated by revenge. Becoming a bulien is the
inescapable resolution of spirit disturbance (ch. 5 ) .
The term shamanism,derived from Tungus, a Siberian language,
was initially used by Eliade (1964) in the context of Siberia and
Central Asia. In Eliade’s usage it became associated with the soul
flight in which the shaman undertook out-of-body travel, ascending
to the sky or descending to the lower world. The spirit helper en-
dows the shaman with special powers. Bernstein describes the soul
travel of the balien, but in his ethnography of the Taman the soul of
the patient is also believed to be out of the body, having been taken
away by a spirit. The bulien is a shamanhealer who effects cures
through the flight of the soul and contact with spirits, whom she is
able to invoke, see, and hear, making the human souls palpable and
enabling their retrieval. The frame of mind of the shaman is charac-
terized as ecstasy, a term that has been substituted for altered states
of consciousness including “trance,” “spirit possession.” and “dis-
sociation.”
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001
Bernstein cites Winkelman’s distinctions among shamans, sha-
madhealen, mediums, and healers (1992) and builds on this evolu-
tionary model, referring to the true or primordial shaman of
so-called “classical” shamanism, who is defined by soul flight and
archaic ceremonies such as the dance. This leaves one asking
whether there are shamans who are not healers. Bernstein refers
also to Winkelman’s argument that shamanism arises in the context
of sedentary residence, agriculture, and political integration. But
what about shamanhealers among pastoralists and cultures with
low levels of political integration? There has been strong criticism
of the cross-culturaluse of such concepts as “shamanism,”“witch-
craft,’’ and “sorcery,”but in both Bernstein and Turner the term sha-
manism remains inadequately problematized.
Friedson’sDancing Prophets (1996) is on healing and spirit pos-
session among a Bantu-speaking people of southeastern Africa
known for their powerful healers and strong drummers. The
Tumbuka of eastern Malawi are Christians but have a vibrant spirit
life. LuBemba is one of the many men and women nchimi healers
who “dances her disease.” During a divinatory trance, she makes di-
agnoses and prophesies futures. Afflicted by general body malaise,
on one occasion, she was diagnosed as having the disease of the
prophets and became an apprenticeto her husband, a nchimi healer.
Nchimi are dancing prophets and herbalists considered the most
powerful of the indigenoushealers of northern Malawi. The calling
to their vocation is signaled by what Eliade calls an “initiatory sick-
ness” that signifies their power to heal. During their dreams, they
undertake journeys to discover who is responsible for witchcraft
and illness. The vimbuza constitute a class of spirits derived from
foreign conquerors. During the trance, these spirits are “heated”
through drumming, singing, and clapping. The music actualizes
multiple vimbuza, a numinous source of energy that comes out and
dances.
The vimbuza dance is characteristicof the ritual of affliction. The
vimbuza also demand fresh blood, and Friedson describes the ani-
mal sacrifice as a climactic point that determines whether the pa-
tient will return to everyday life and go on to become a healer. Dur-
ing this chilopa (ritual involving animal blood sacrifice), the patient
may suck the blood of a specified animal such as a white cock or a
white she-dove. Friedson identifies this as one of the binary opera-
tions in the ritual: the sacrifice cools the spirits by satisfying their
thirst for blood and so restores the disturbed equilibrium between
hot and cold in the patient’s body. Instead of a taking of life, there is
a taking in of life, a significant ontological difference, as Friedson
puts it (93). The cooling-down phase of the ritual is accompaniedby
a spatial movement from outside to back inside the temple-from
drinking blood to eating meat, the food of the ancestral spirits, the
mizimu, with whom the nchimi are able to communicate and who
give them the power to see. Friedson interprets this as a move away
from the wildness of the vimbuza spirits to the tamer ancestral spir-
its-hence, from nature to culture. Friedson writes, “This liminal
world, betwixt and between the numinous and the mundane, is pre-
cisely where nchimi and their followers enact a clinical reality. Into
this musically created liminality comes the possibility of a
communitas that has the potential to release cultural forces of
healing-the meta-power Turner speaks of as resulting from ‘social
arousal, however produced”’ (164). The author learns to play the
drums, takes dream medicine, and can foresee attacks by witches.
As he dances the vimbuza, he feels his perception becoming de-
tached from his body, his body space expanding and becoming elas-
tic (20, 118).
Religious Studies Review / 217
In the Tumbuka theory of illness, God and witches, as well as
spirits, are also causes of disease. Interestingly, unlike in the West-
ern system, illnesses (such as those that identify the nchimi) are
judged positively.The Tumbuka are representativeof other African
cultures where traditional and Western health care systems are not
mutually exclusive but interact with each other. While nchimi have
taken to the use of Western medicine such as vitamins and antibiot-
ics, the Western sector dismisses indigenous health care systems as
superstition. Friedson’s arguments that musical experience trans-
forms consciousness and that it is impossible to separate vimbuza
music from vimbuza dance, because in a very real way they are mu-
siddance, are convincing. He points out that approaches to music
concentrate on text as content rather than on musical sound. But I
am somewhat suspicious of the category “ethnomusicology”as it
constructs Western music in terms of being “non-ethno” or univer-
sal music, that is, the other of “ethnic” music.
Kapferer’s The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Conscious-
ness and Power (1997) continues his research on Sinhalese Bud-
dhist ritual, particularly the ritual dramas of healing and demon ex-
orcism. It has been rightly described as an outstanding work on
sorcery and exorcism. Sorcery relates to a range of spells and ritual
acts that include witchcraft and seek the obliteration of the victim.
Kapfererdefines sorceryas refemng to practices “concernedto har-
ness and manipulate those energies and forces which are centred in
human beings and which extend from them to intervene-help,
harm, or protect-in the action and circumstance of other human
beings” (8). Sorcery is seen as raw power, as energy underlying
both creation and destruction (261). The sorcerer is the other of the
shaman, whose intervention is required to heal sorcery victims.
Unlike witchcraft, which can be practiced by anyone, Kapferer
points out that sorcery is the work of specialists. An earlier work, A
Celebration of Demons (1983), was an account of the structuralpro-
cess of Sinhalese exorcism based on rites associated with the great
cemetery demon, Mahasoma. This book covers new ground in
looking at the major antisorcery rite of the demon-deity Suniyam.
This deity has an ambiguous, dual identity. Once a village demon,
he has now been elevated to the Buddhist pantheon, but he is re-
garded as a god of the outside rather than of the inside like Vishnu,
Pattini, and Kamanga. Gluckman’s Manchester school looked at
sorcery as emerging from contradictionsand conflicts in the social
and moral order and recognized its role in the political process.
Kapferer follows this approach, viewing sorcery as part of a larger
whole. He examines at length two mythic narratives that frame the
antisorcery rite: Mahasammata-Manikpalaon the origin of sorcery
and the attack on the first victim, and Vijaya-Kuvenion the origin of
the sorcerer. Both identify the terrifying, destructuring violence of
sorcery as arising simultaneously with the constitution of the
sociopolitical order. Kapferer sees Suniyam’s enlargement as re-
flecting the growth of the modem state so that “in many ways he re-
fracts the violence of the state....The metaphors of the political-of
violence, authority, command, control, containment, division, and
transgression-are the metaphors of sorcery” (33-35).
The Buddhist rite of Suniyama seeks to return victims to
life-regenerating aspects of their life-world by breaking the bonds
that sorcerers and demonic agents have established with them. The
essence of agents of sorcery is captured in bottles and consigned to
the sea. Kapfererexamines the rite as a sacrificesince it is described
so by its ritual practitioners. Indeed, he views sacrifice as the core
process in most forms that anthropologists study as ritual. The vio-
lence of sacrifice is simultaneous with its act of (re)originationby
218 / Religious Studies Review
means of which the orders of body and world are restored. Kapferer
builds on Hubert and Mauss’s well-known study of sacrifice
(1899), which conceives of it as ritual action relating destruction to
regeneration and transformation. He critiques, however, their con-
ception of the sacred and profane on which the idea of the sacrificial
process rests as expressing the dualism of Western idealism.
Performative acts such as cutting, severing, and destroying are
performed throughout the Suniyama and accompanied by the giv-
ing of gifts, which plays a central role in the sacrifice. The victim’s
giving of gifts in the Suniyama and other exorcisms “is an act sepa-
rating the demonic from the victims. They receive back the pollu-
tion of their destructive consumption” (202). Through the gift a
bond is establishedand the relation of the demon and the victim sev-
ered. The demon will leave the victim. The victim is restored to
agency even as the sorcerer is divested of power. In conceiving of
the gift as poisonous, negating, and separating, Kapferer seeks to go
beyond Mauss’s identification of the gift with reciprocity. The
Suniyama then “is a preeminent practice of the gift.” The victim in
the rite is made to live the practice of the gift. The Suniyama might
be understood as the habitus of the gift, and the victim is taken
through what might be called the exercises (or the discipline) of the
gift. Thus, “the doxa, the routine logics of practice, the
taken-for-granted and not consciously reflected on processes en-
gaged in the daily construction and reconstruction of daily
life-worlds...are revealed and practiced in a context, that of the rite,
in which their full structuring force is made apparent in and before
experience” (200).
Kapferer takes issue with anthropologists such as Obeyesekere
who rationalize sorcery as a folk idiom for the expression of psy-
chological and social tension negating the sense of sorcery as a de-
structive force that is consubstantial with the being of the victim.
This social-sciencetranslation, Kapferer maintains,adds nothing to
what is self-evident to victims and can trivialize the experience of
sorcery. He emphasizes that sorcery is an intrusive and destructive
force of the malign consciousnessof others within the victim’s field
of everyday action (43). Surely, but one wonders whether Kapferer
does not go overboard and identify exclusively with the victim’s
perspective. The problem arises when one shifts to the perspective
of women who have been identified and then harassed, even killed,
as a result of being perceived as sources of sorcery. The parallel be-
tween sorcery and torture stresses the dehumanizing potential of
sorcery attack but not that of persecution for alleged witchcraft. A
witch is seen as devouring and depriving a person of agency, of
personhood (Jacobson-Widding).But Kapferer regards himself in
the tradition of Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski (and like
Obeyesekerein this case), maintaining that sorcery and other magi-
cal practices have their own pragmatics and rationality.
The Mageo and Howard volume, Spirits in Culture, History, and
Mind (1996), addresses a major issue-the relationship between
Christianity and spirits, which has often been portrayed in
oppositional terms. Christianity under colonialism brought with it
ideas of the superiority of monotheism over polytheism. In Indone-
sia, both Islam and Christianity looked down on the traditional ani-
mism and shamanism of the Taman as “devil worship.” It has often
been assumed that the world religions would displace spirits, but
beliefs in spirits continue to persist. In fact a mutually
transformationalimpact can be witnessed as Christianity itself is re-
invented. As the Pacific Islands faced the impact of missionization,
spirits came to represent what was local and “traditional” against
proselytizing,totalizing religions. Further, new forms of possession
Volume 27 Number 3 /July $3001
came into being even as there was a decline in mediumship. Lest
these be seen as syncretistic deviations, Mageo and Howard point
out, contrary to the literature on cultural reinvention, that cultural
borrowing and reinventions are highly self-conscious and reflec-
tive, not merely naive adaptations (4).
The collection presents four case studies of the Pacific basin with
differing focuses. Levy, Mageo. and Howard attempt to distinguish
between gods and spirits. The former have a priesthood and are as-
sociated with social institutions and the community’s moral order.
Spirits are extra-moral-even evil-and threats to order unless
bound through acts of power and put to communityuse. They are as-
sociated with polities with greater autonomy and more tenuous
moral authority.
Gordon analyzes Tongan spirit possession to suggest that pos-
session is a product of the relationshipbetween Bourdieu’s habitus
and agency. But is this combination distinctive of possession?After
all, cannot other practices also be seen as such? Gordon does not ad-
dress such questions. She views the possessed body as the embodi-
ment of specific practices of social discipline.andcensorship (57).
involving a repression of female sexual expressiveness. This is an
inversion of the usual perspective that sees possession as a reaction
to the repression that modernity enhances.
In Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia, as in Samoa, there has
been a shift in forms of possession from intentional mediumship to
involuntary possession. The disappearance of voluntary spirit pos-
session in this century is largely attributed to Christianity. The
Chuukese combine their Christian faith with belief in spirits; spirit
encounters can result in possession or in an external attack on the
person (Hezel and Dobbin, 199). This essay counterposes the eth-
nographer’sfocus on trance, which is only one part of the total phe-
nomenon, with the most important part of Chuukese possession,
speaking. “Speech, talk,discourse are central; trance is but a pre-
lude” (212). Hollan similarly shows that the church accepts the an-
cestral souls of Toraja of Indonesia, but not the gdspirits. The es-
says by Whitehouse and Hollan suggest the range of spirits
including gods, ancestral souls, and amoral spiritual agencies.
Laderman and Roseman’s The P e r j o m n c e ofHealing (1996)is
a work on shamanism, spirit possession, and trance-dancing. This
volume draws attention to the aesthetic impact of performance,
demonstratinghow the dramatic effect of music and dance, poetry,
drama and comedy, and sacrifice and divination restores health.
Several chapters also highlight the geography of healing, since
travel during the trance is associated with images of places. This
creates a “participatory poetics” capable of therapeutic transforma-
tion (9).
Several essays in this collection, such as those of Roseman and
Stoller,devote attention to the role of song and music. Stoller ques-
tions the way in which sound has been spatialized into writing in the
Western philosophical tradition, undermining the oral-aural world.
He reinforces Friedson’s thematic, drawing attention to the sensu-
ousness of sound. In the two essays by Schieffelin and Kendall, the
performance as event is highlighted through descriptions of failed
performances. Kendall cautions against a simplistic application of
performance theory. Chini, the Korean woman shaman, fails be-
cause she does not let herself be overcome with emotion or lost in
performance. Schieffelin shows how the shaman is seen as a pre-
tender failing to establish credibility with the audience and thus los-
ing power. Csordas describes Catholic charismatic ritual healing.
This suggests how Christianity itself is not immune to spirits. Pa-
tients place memories of past traumas into a eucharisticcup, leading
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001
to the divine embrace. This is seen as “growing up” and “coming to
know who I am in Christ.” Stoller shows how the cosmology of the
Songhay of Niger is able to blend Islamic and indigenous concepts.
Laderman’s chapter on Malay shamanism suggests both the
overlay with Islam and the tension with Islamic orthodoxy. In Ma-
lay etiology, illness is seen as a result of imbalances that result from
a depletion or accumulation of “Inner Winds.” These are crucial for
the personality; their absence leaves room for the breaching of the
“gates” of the body, making it vulnerable to spirit attacks. Posses-
sion mostly requires exorcism in a shaman’s stance during which
he becomes a medium for spirits. The poetic language of songs and
the chant of the invocation enable the trance of the healer. He in turn
helps the patient achieve a trance. The Malay shaman’s power to
heal lies in his enabling the winds to blow freely and recall the uni-
versal spirit that dwells in all creation.
Desjarlais’s essay in this volume is on a Tibetan Buddhist group,
the Yolmo Sherpa. He challenges the focus on myth, metaphors,
and symbols that has dominated ethnographies of healing since
LCvi-Strauss, emphasizing instead the performative and
dramaturgical aspects of ritual healing. The Himalayan shamans of
this group in Nepal work on the senses, through which they are able
to change the way a patient feels. The shaman Meme’s cacophony
of music, taste, sight, touch, and wild, tactile images activates the
senses and the imagination (160). Once again we have the Eliadean
paradigm of soul flight. Like Bernstein’s Taman healers, the sha-
man here restores spirit loss from the patient in a “spirit-hooking”
rite. This establishes a kinesthetic attentiveness or presence that
means health. The body wakes up and the patient is able to reengage
with life.
Roseman’s contribution describes how the healer Abilen in-
vokes Sri Kelantan, and through the healing of a particular individ-
ual effects social healing. This addresses scars in the history of the
Temiar, a society of rainforest horticulturalistsin peninsular Malay-
sia. Poseman maintains, “It enacts preventive and therapeutic heal-
ing for a group traumatized by their encounters with deforestation,
Islamic religious evangelism, and the transformation of their econ-
omy from generalized reciprocity to mercantile and capitalist sys-
tems of exchange” (234). But the “how” of this healing is not ade-
quately developed. Is social healing just about the “musics of
survival” and gaining the “strength to carry on” (264)? There does
not seem to be any relation between Temiar “empowerment” and
socipl mobilizatiodprotest that would potentially counter their
marginality and the presence of invasive “out-foresters.”
Tsing’s In rhe Realm of the Diamond Queen (1993) is one of the
most debated contemporary ethnographies, with supporters and
critics arrayed against each other. I must confess my own predilec-
tion for the arguments of the former. The most fascinating aspect of
the book is not just the complex theoretical terrain it negotiates in-
volving debates in cultural and feminist theory but the challenge it
takes on of “writing culture” with a difference. Tsing does not con-
ceive of culture in a frozen “ethnographic present” independent of
time and history. The Meratus inhabit the South Kalimantan moun-
tainous rainforest of Indonesia. The author’s prose is interspersed
with numerous narratives that bring out the heterogeneity of their
experience of the state and the global economy. In the process,
Tsing challenges the romance of the primitive. The insertion of tem-
porality permits an account of the displacement faced by once au-
tonomous groups who inhabited rainforests, mountains, and deserts
as they come up against civilization, progress, and states that make
demands on land and resources. Tsing argues that the media
Religious Studies mw / 219
e
exoticizes and romanticizes “primitive” communities the world
over, contrasting their pristine innocence with the imagined “us” of
modernity. The anthropologist’scomplicity in this regard has led to
contrasts with primitive/traditionalenclaves u f aBourdieu’s Alge-
ria. Tsing’s project is not only to break down this contrast but to
open discussion on the very character of the community,caught as it
is in contemporary political and economic contexts that are both na-
tional and international. She uses the concept of marginality to dis-
place that of the primitive. Marginality is a space simultaneously
imbued with both violence and creativity.
Tsing’s starting point is “local understandings,” and she takes is-
sue with Kristeva for her epistemological dichotomy between “Eu-
ropean ‘theory’and global ‘empirical’ variation in which, by defini-
tion, the Third World can never be a source of theoretical insight”
( 180-81). Highlighting the innovations and interpretations of fe-
male shamanism, Tsing relocates shamanism itself as the spiritual
practice of a community embedded in a configuration of state power
and the world economy. Unlike most work that highlightsthe power
of the person of the shaman, Tsing brings out the ways in which sha-
manic spirituality reflects power relations as an aspect of Meratus
subordination and emerges as an important site for the negotiations
of Meratus politics. The Meratus are as a result seen by the main-
stream as outside legitimate religion and even as “amoral” and “un-
civilized.”
Induan Hiling is a woman shaman in a context in which almost
all shamans are men. The narrative of her shamanism locates the tra-
dition as a struggle “within and against conventions of gender, per-
formance, and politics; and as a gender-sensitive recasting of
Meratus ethnicity and national status” (23 1). It is only her charis-
matic leadership and healing abilities that allow her to be a shaman
even as she exposes the gender biases of shamanic expression
(240). As a critic of public shamanism, Induan Hiling reformulates
its aesthetic and political strategy by sidestepping performance re-
quirements that give advantage to men. Instead of the formal cere-
mony where shamans perform chants, she sings love songs and uses
drawings in more informal contexts. Her deployment of writing in-
dicates an ethnic agenda in which Meratus Dayaks challenge and
are challenged by powerful, literate foreigners. In her use of popular
music, she combines the role of a shaman with the attraction of a
rock star. Uma Adang undertakes an even further transformation of
shamanism toward a shamanism of etiquette, theological speeches,
and law. Her ethnic agenda focuses on codified customary law and a
religion “that can talk back to Islam” (247). It calls for a religious
pluralism in which the Meratus have their own prophets. I find it
somewhat difficult, however, to agree with Tsing’s characterization
of the creative Hilang as a “structuralist critic” or a
“poststructuralist” who “deconstructs the taken-for-granted
grounds of shamanic representation” or of Uma Adang’s
“postmodern marginality” (240, 254).
Viswesaran has argued that the first-person narrative has been
consigned to the margins of anthropological discourse (1994, 21).
Tsing takes care to reverse this trend. Even as the cultural group is
seen in terms of wider cross-cultural relationships, the personalized
positioning of the ethnographer herself is in relation to the major
Meratus narrative voice of Uma Adang. The intriguing title “Dia-
mond Queen” refers to “the conceptual space” created in the course
of ethnographic interaction. Tsing rejects the model of center and
periphery, arguing that the so-called “periphery” is itself a site of
heterogeneity and transcultural dialogue. But surely the inhabitants
of the mountainous rainforests of Indonesia or tribal peoples else-
220 / Religious Studies Review
where do constitutea periphery in terms of the global political econ-
omy.
Edith Turner is ably positioned to write on shamanism,given her
work on ritual healing among the Ndembu of Zambia. Healing and
Spirit Presence among a Northern Alaskan People ( 1996)is an eth-
nography of the Inupiat. Turner comes to the village of Ivakuk to
study healing, which she soon realizes cannot be understood with-
out relation to “spirit events.” Healing is rooted in a cosmos popu-
lated by spirits. Turner defines a spirit as a reverberation emanating
in its old milieu from some strong personality (232). Ironically,
what is not real creates what is real, disturbing positivist postula-
tions of causality. For the Inupiat, everything, both the animate and
the material world, has an iiiua or soul-hence their sensibility to
the connectedness of all life forms. Illness is seen as substance or
“spirit stuff” that tells lies to the afflicted and infects the body.
Helping spirits aid shamans, both men and women. As spirits
and ancestors work through the shaman, they heal the sick, commu-
nicate with the dead, and assist the project of living. A healing
trance is accompanied by a journey in which the shaman dances his
or her spirit animal to the accompanimentof drumming and songs.
When the shaman’s body falls, the spirit leaves the body. Traveling
through the water or ice, or underground, or above the tundra, the
shaman visits the home of animalsto ask them to return health to the
ailing person. Healing takes place, as among the Taman, through
soul retrieval by a shaman. Christianity has been superimposed on
preceding traditions that include beliefs in shaman journeys and in
the reincarnation of humans and animals such as the eagle and the
whale through the embodiment of spirits.
During the period of her fieldwork,Turner has a close associa-
tion with the women healers, Netta and Claire. She learns from their
use of their hands. Turner reflects on a “certain awareness in the hu-
man consciousness of a link between oneself and the sufferer, em-
powered by a kind of rushing of one’s own consciousness into that
of the other....The hands are able to transmit a sympathy with the
person’s sick tissues and to intimately work at the pain, reposition-
ing the organs, and attracting the pain into the hands which are Je-
sus’s hands” (74-75). Inupiat healing is then a conversation be-
tween two bodies by means of the hands’ work. (There is also,
however, distance healing.) Most shamans describe four-day sha-
manic episodes characterized by moodiness and withdrawal. Ac-
cording to Turner, this refers to what Eliade characterized as the
shaman’s dismemberment during the shamanic journey and the
subsequentreassembling.Claire describes to Turner her near-death
experiences after which an angel touched her hands “on both sides
with light.” “The healing is now stronger; I owe it only to God,” she
states (208). The book is evocative of the field experience and per-
vaded by Turner’s own spirituality, as reflected in her spirit experi-
ences and shamanic experiments.
Like a number of contemporary anthropologists, Turner joins
the uend of “visibilizing”the researcher, following the critiques of
Geertz, Clifford, and others on “writing cultures.” She even
reconceives the role of anthropologists,maintainingthat their busi-
ness now is “to serve people and act as a link for them” (240).Some
problems arise, however, from her attempt “to show the organic in-
ternal quality of fieldwork itself, and let the material emerge as
whole cloth” akin to the birth of a baby (xx). Her ethnography is
written in the form of a year’s chronicle, with theoretical material
appearing in the text at the points it occurred to the author as she
worked in the field.
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001
The book, however, lacks the cutting edge of theoretical inci-
siveness. One does not quite see, for instance, how Turner estab-
lishes Durkheim as the father of deconstructionism. Turner identi-
fies with process anthropology, simultaneously distancing herself
from the structuralist, constructionist, and deconstructionist
schools. She follows what she considers Victor Turner’s dictum, to
“go by experience. Think about what you experience. Develop your
ability to experience in different ways (xxii).”
Conclusions
I conclude this review with some overarching points about the is-
sues raised. The first concerns an unresolvable epistemological is-
sue in anthropology. Since spirits are related to narratives, Turner
raises the problem that confronts anthropologists again and
again-the relationship between narrative and truth. She resolves it
by arguing that within the network of Inupiat life, one becomes
aware of the Inupiat’s own truth, in process, in use. But does this not
reinstate a singular notion of truth? Is there a single, communal truth
for any given culture? Surely this claim cannot be sustained by an
experience-oriented anthropology.
This body of literature also indicates more textured ways of writ-
ing ethnography. Yet one continues to wonder about the conse-
quences of ethnography’s transforming itself into personal ethnog-
raphy and anthropological poetics. Bruner (1993) has likewise
warned against the transformation of the anthropology of experi-
ence into stones of researchers. As Friedson puts it, “when reflex-
ivity falls into reminiscence, it is no longer ethnography” (4-5).
I have argued elsewhere that s h a d s p i r i t discourse is a rich
source for reflecting on and reframing discourses about the self and
the other (Mayaram 1999a). Here we have an extremely important
zone of cultural exchange and encounter, but, unfortunately, it has
not been mined as such. The heteroglossia is not read as cultures in
dialogue, although the ethnographies implicitly acknowledge this.
Take, for instance, a series of statements that suggest different per-
spectives on the individual person. Friedson points out that the pos-
sessed body acquires an ontological status in the world that is nei-
ther given nor experienced in terms of the Cartesian duality
separatingmind from body (see also Bernstein 1997). Kramer com-
ments on the “fusion of the other within the subject” (1993, 38).
Csordas cites Levine on intimacy with the other in terms of an imag-
ined presence, invented conversation, and anticipated togetherness
(Laderman and Roseman, 104). Feinberg derives an associative
model of the person from the merging of numinal and human beings
(Mageo and Howard, 100). Kapferer refers to “the fundamental
...
sociality of human beings and the immanence of society in the
fact of human existence” (4).
The porous corporealities of dancing prophets and sha-
man-healersdo not cohere with established Western conceptions of
the body as a bounded, delimited, and inviolate space. Indeed they
suggest an extraordinary expansion of the self (Tsing, 98).3 But
conclusions are not developed as to how the self (both individual
and collective) is oriented to the ethnic other, imaginatively, cre-
atively, and destructively. Further, while spirits are used to under-
stand and expand the frontiers of the dimensionsof religious experi-
ence, ideas of relational personhood are not seen as potentially
revising a general theory of selfhood.
Shamans and spirit mediums not only make possible individual
healing but also help heal what must have been a communal past of
conquest and violence; they offer a cultural strategy that enables ac-
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001 Religious stdies Review/ 221

commodation between groups and provides an alternative to the that acts and demonstrates agency. In this view, the self is seen as bounded, delim-
politics of righting historical wrongs that only reproduce and ited. and mutually exclusive (Friedson, 5 ; Feinberg, in Magco and Howard,113).
deepen fissures. Friedson shows how the spirits of erstwhile con-
querors called vimbuza are used to fight witchcraft and save lives. References
Regrettably, he identifies them as the “other” (97-98), even though
he intersperses his account with statements such as ASAD,TALAL
In vimbuza, dancer and spirit, drummer and singer encounter each 1993 Genealogies of Religion. Johns Hopkins University Press.
other within a field of shifting rhythmic figures. Here, musical struc- ATKINSON,
JANEMONNIG
ture itself is conducive to the blurring of distinctions between sub- 1989 The Art and Politics of Wana Shamanship. University of
ject and object, and between inner and outer time. Vimbuza California Press.
drumming is seductive in this way, and it is structured to be so 1992 “Shamanisms Today.” Annual Review of Anthropology
through its shifting rhythmic perspectives. Spirit and Tumbuka meet 21,307-30.
in the music of vimbuza, and both are transformed as a result (158).
BESNIER,NIKO
Kapferer argues in his earlier work, A Celebrurion of Demons 1996 “Heteroglossic Discourses on Nukulaelae Spirits.” In
(1983), that the rite is a metaphor for the riot (xiii, 215). The sorcery Mageo and Howard, 75-98.
rite that centers on sacrificial violence and reorigination is seen as
parallel to the process of nationalism. Exorcism is viewed as a BIESELE,MEGAN,AND ROBBIEDAVIS-FLOYD
model for the extreme expression of otherness manifest in violence. 1996 “Dying as Medical Performance: The Oncologist as
Charon.” In Laderman and Roseman, 291-322.
I have questioned this position elsewhere, arguing that the rite can
also be a counterethnic metaphor, generating a new set of relations BOWEN,ELEANOR SMITH
arising from the cosmic incorporation of the “other” and the interac- 1954 Return to Laughter. Harper.
tion and networks that healing centers entail (Mayaram forthcom- BRUNER,EDWARD M.
ing). Implicit in The Feast ofthe Sorcerer is a substantial revision of 1993 “Introduction: The Ethnographic Self and the Personal
Kapferer’s earlier position and a conception of the rite as also re- Self.” In Paul Benson (ed.), Anthropology and Literature,
storative, making possible healing and the recovery of sociality. 1-26. University of Illinois Press.
What happens to the terrain of interethnic relations in healing
contexts, however, is a question that is not directly addressed by CAVENDISH,
RICHARD
1975 The Powers of Evil in Western Religion. Magic and Folk
these works. Surely the “intense, intersubjective experience that
Belief, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
brings healer, patient and spirit into an existential immediacy un-
paralleled in quotidian or ritual life” (Friedson, 7) is bound to have COLSON,ELIZABETH
its reverberations in everyday relations between communities. The 1969 “Spirit Possession among the Tonga of Zambia.” In John
Taman, for instance, most of whom have been Christianized, also Beatty and John Middleton (eds.), Spirit Mediumship and
patronize Malay Muslim healers called dukun, who use a combina- Society in Africa, 69-103. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
tion of herbalism and Islamic knowledge such as Koranic amulets. CRAPANZANO,
VINCENT
The dukun cure illnesses (including sexual problems), locate lost 1973 The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry.
property, and divine fortunes. Bernstein’s data counters Louis University of California Press.
Golomb (1985) by observing that Taman and other non-Malay pa- CSORDAS,
THOMAS
tients are treated by Malay healers (41-43). Turner refers to the 1996 “Imaginal Performance and Memory in Ritual Healing.”
connectedness implicit in shamanistic discourse. Shamanism then In Laderman and Roseman. 9 1- 141.
can provide a cultural space that addresses differences, including
problems arising out of intersubjective and ethnic conflict. Else- DESJARLAIS,
ROBERT
where I have described medical pluralism as one of the major 1992 Body and Emotion. University of Pennsylvania Press.
sources of the phenomenon of “living together,” or what is less ade- ELIADE,MIRCEA
quately called the coexistence between communities (Mayaram 1964 Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Bollingen.
1999b).Healing ritual thus offers immense possibilities for rethink- EVANS-PRITCHARD,
E. E.
ing intercommunity relations in many areas of the world. 1937 Witchcraj?, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Ox-
ford University Press.
Notes
FEINBERG,
RICHARD
1. Bernstein points out that the role of women as ritual specialists was reduced in
1996 “Spirit Encounters on a Polynesian Outlier: Anuta, Solo-
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam but is high in shamanism. mon Islands.” In Mageo and Howard, 99-120.
2. Kleinman heralded the move away from a purely biomedical paradigm to in-
clude a consideration of “medicine’s symbolic reality” as central to clinical efficacy.
GOLOMB,LOUIS
He highlighted the clinical. encounter between healer and patient in which the mean- 1985 An Anthropology of Curing in Multiethnic Thailand. Uni-
ing of the illness is interpreted. In this process, a symbolic reality relates the social versity of Illinois Press.
environment to physiological processes (1978). The “cultural construction of clini-
cal reality” plays a majorrole in the healing process. This theory was a shift from the GOODMAN,
FELICITASD., JEANNETTE H. HENNEY, AND BTHER PRESSEL
emphasis on faith or the psychological basis of efficacy such as in Victor Turner’s 1974 Trance, Healing, and Hallucination: Three Field Studies.
work. Kleinman sought a “comparative science of healing,” departing from the John Wiley.
“mechanistic view of bodily dysfunction” in Western medical practice (1980).
3. In much of Western thought, the self is the seat of knowledge and certainty, of x..AND JAYD.DOBBIN
HEZEL.FRANCIS
subjectivity and reflexivity. It is conceived as a biological entity, the locus of erno- 1996 “Spirit Possession in Chuuk.” In Mageo and Howard,
tion, passion, reason, and pain; the Cartesian cogiro that is potentially autonomous, 195-212.
222 / Religiom studies Review Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001

HOLLAN,DOUGLAS Tarabout and Jackie Assayag (eds.), La possession en

1996 “Cultural and Experiential Aspects of Spirit Beliefs Asie du Sud: parole, corps, territoire, 101-3 1.
Among the Toraja.” In Mageo and Howard, 213-37. 1999b “Living Together: Ajmer as a Paradigm for the (South)
Asian City.” In Darini Rajsingham (ed.). Multicultural-
HUBERT,H.,AND MARCELMAUSS
ism: Modes of Coexistence in South and Southeast Asia.
1899, 1964Sacrijice: Its Nature and Function. Trans. W. D. Halls.
Washington, DC: Sasakawa Peace Foundation.
Routledge.
Forthcoming “Spirit Possession, Spirit Mediumship and Exorcism
JACOBSON-WIDDING,
ANITA in a Rural Shrine: Medical Pluralism and Inter Commu-
N.d. “Cannibalism, Witchcraft and Communion as Symbolic nity Relations.” In Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Women and Is-
Discourses on the Self.” Draft paper. lam. Delhi: Manohar.
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BRUCE OBEYESEKERE,
GANANATH
1983 A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of 1981 Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Reli-
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1990 The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psy-
KAUL,SUNIL choanalysis and Anthropology. University of Chicago
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1981 Ecstacy and Healing in Nepal: An Ethnopsychiatric Study
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MARINA
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1993 The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa. Trans. SMITH,WILFREDCANTWELL
Malcolm R.Green. Verso. 1962.1991 The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to
the Religious Traditions of Mankind. Fortress.
LADERMAN,
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1988 “Wayward Winds: Malay Archetypes, and Theory of Per- STOLLER,
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sonality in the Context of Shamanism.” Social Science 1996 “Sounds and Things: Pulsations of Power in Songhay.” In
and Medicine 27:8,799-810. Laderman and Roseman. 165-84.
1991 Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine, and TAMBIAH,
STANLEYJ.
Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance. University 1970 Buddhism and the Spirit Cults of North-East Thailand.
of California Press. Cambridge University Press.
1996 ‘The Poetics of Healing in Malay Shamanistic Perfor-
mances.” In Laderman and Roseman, 115-41. TAUSSIG,
MICHAEL
1987 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in
LAMBEK, MICHAEL Terror and Healing. University of Chicago Press.
198 1 A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte. Cambridge
University Press. TURNER, EDITH,WILLIAMBLODGETT, SINGLETON KAHONA, AND VIC-
1996 “Afterword: Spirits and Their Histories.” In Mageo and TOR TURNER
Howard, 237-49. 1986 “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropol-
ogy of Experience.” In Victor Turner and Edward Bruner
LEVY,ROBERTI., JEANETTE M. MAGEO,AND ALANHOWARD (eds.), The Anthropology of Experience, 33-44. University
1996 “Gods, Spirits, and History: A Theoretical Perspective.” of Illinois Press.
In Mag& and Howard, 11-27.
TURNER, VICTOR
LEWIS,I. M. 1968, 1996 The Drums of Afliction: A Study of Religious Processes
197 1, 1989Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Pos- among the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford University Press.
session. Routledge.
VISWESARAN, KAMALA
MAGEO,JEANETTE MARIE 1994 The Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. University of
19% “Continuity and Shape Shifting: Samoan Spirits in Cul- Minnesota Press.
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WINKELMAN, MICHAEL
MAYARAM,SHAIL 1992 Shamans, Priests, and Witches:A Cross-Cultural Study of
1999a “Spirit Possession: Reframing Discourses of the Self and Magico-Religious Practitioners. Arizona State University
Other.” Purusartha 21 (Paris), special issue, Gilles press.
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
THE SOCIAL ORIGINS OF CHRISTIAN
ARCHITECTURE
By L. Michael White
Harvard Theological Studies 42
Vol. 1, BUILDING GOD’S HOUSE IN THE ROMAN
WORLD: ARCHITECTURAL ADAPTATION AMONG
PAGANS, JEWS, AND CHRISTIANS
Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996
Pp. xi + 211. Paper, $17.00.
Vol. 2, TEXTS AND MONUMENTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN
DOMUS ECCLESIAE IN ITS ENVIRONMENT
Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997
Pp.xx + 524. Paper, $30.00.
Reviewers: Steven J. Friesen, Edgar Krentz, Ulrike Outschar,
and Carolyn Osiek
1. Building on Building God’s House: Architecture
and the Social Settings of Early Churches
Reviewer: Steven J. Friesen
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211-4140
E xceptional books make contributions to specific discussions
and also open up new avenues of exploration with farther
reaching implications.L. Michael White’s two-volume work,
The Social Origins of Christian Architecture, is such a study. It as-
sembles data old and new regarding the sacred spaces used by
churches in the first four to five centuries of Christian history, pro-
poses explanations for the data, and analyzes the implications for
the organization and developmentof those churches.’ To do justice
to such a multifaceted study, this set of four essays expands the tra-
ditional review format.The first essay provides a synopsis and eval-
uation of the main argument; the following three use White’s study
as a startingpoint to suggest ways we might build on his work.*I be-
gin by looking at content, method, and theory in White’s study.
In terms of content, White’s goal is to reconstruct and interpret
the evolution of Christian sacred space from the New Testament era
of house churches to the advent of the Constantinian basilica in the
fourth century CE. Geographically, the discussion ranges widely,
from Roman Britain in the northern reaches of the empire, to the
Italian heartland,to the eastern province of Syria. White surveys the
known archaeological remains of Christian meeting places from
those centuries-focusing especially on Dura-Europos, Rome,
Lullingstone, and Philippi-and supplements this material evi-
dence with Christian and non-Christian literary references to
church assemblies. The result is a synthesis that questions the
widely accepted conclusion, associated especially with
Krautheimer (1986), that the Constantinian basilica was a foreign
imposition of the fourth century.
White identifies four stages in the development of Christian ar-
chitectureon his way to this conclusion. The earliest was the house
church. No archaeological evidence can be found for this stage be-
cause congregations met in houses that were not modified architec-
Religious Studies Review / 223
turally; the churches used the spaces available to them and so left no
traces of their assembly.
The second stage began once houses were modified to accom-
modate the congregation. White accepts standard terminology for
this phase by calling such a structurethe domus ecclesiae (“house of
the church”) and describes examples from as early as the third cen-
tury. Renovations were made inside houses to provide more space
for assembly and additional rooms for related purposes, which leads
to the crucial question of why these changes were required. white
offers two reasons for the emergence of the domus ecclesiae. One
was probably pragmatic: numerical growth of the congregation.
The other reason’wasrelated to ritual: as the eucharist became sepa-
rated from the agape (love feast), the locus of Christian worship
shifted away from the dining table, and thus larger spacesfor assem-
bly were needed.
The third architectural stage-the aula ecclesiae. or “hall of the
church”-is crucial for White’s argument.The aula ecclesiae was a
building either completely remodeled for use by a congregation or
constructed specificallyfor such use. Examples are known from the
late third or early fourth centuries, demonstrating that it was a
pre-Constantinian development. It was characterized by “a ten-
dency to standardize the rectangular hall plan for assembly and
cluster ancillary rooms, annexes, or dependencies around it”
(1:137). There was often a raised platform at one end of the hall,
which probably reflects increasing distance between clergy and la-
ity in ritual. The exterior of such a building might blend in with do-
mestic architecture (as did the domus ecclesiae) or might present a
distinguishable facade, depending on the local situation.
The importance of the third stage is that it was in some respects
the precursor to the Constantinian basilica. Krautheimer described
the developmentof the Constantinian basilica as a radical deviation
from the domus ecclesiae, a deviation due to a new ideological ori-
entation of the church under Constantine (39-43). White, on the
other hand, in identifying the aula ecclesiae, has isolated a stage be-
tween the domus ecclesiae and the basilica, thus providing a bridge
between them. The tendency toward standardization,the separation
of clergy and laity, the reliance on patrons to provide a building, and
the elaboration of architectural space to meet the elaboration of rit-
ual are all attested before the adoption of the basilica form during
the reign of Constantine. The Constantinian basilica, however, was
novel in two particular ways. One new aspect of the basilica was
that Christian architecture could now be monumental in scope,
since the basilica form allowed for larger buildings that were clearly
public (rather than private). The second new development-patron-
age by the emperor-made monumentality possible but also intro-
duced new responsibilities that had previously been foreign to the
churches. With the emperor as patron, the churcheswere on the road
to becoming a state religion, charged with supportingand defending
the empire.
If these findings undermine Krautheimer’s thesis that early
Christian architecture shifted from a pragmatic orientation to a
mixed pragmatichdeological orientation during the reign of
Constantine,what alternative paradigm does White propose?He ar-
gues that the phenomenon of patronage provides the common
theme throughout all four phases. The Constantinian phase was
made possible by a new level of patronage, but patrons had always
determined the resources available to churches. Moreover, patron-
age was a common practice in other religious groups and in all sec-
tors of Roman imperial society. The extent to which churches
224 / Religious Studies Review
shared in this practice determined their social standing. Patronage,
then, is the key to the social origins of early church architecture.
This broad argument is important, but it is only one facet of The
Social Origins of Christian Architecture, for it is in the area of
method that the study is most innovative.First, White’s approach is
thoroughly comparative. He defines the house churches as private
cults, which allows him to compare their architecture with that of
other private cults in urban settings of the Roman Empire. Indeed, a
good portion of White’s two volumes is devoted to documenting
and analyzing the ways in which houses were modified for use as
synagoguesor Mithraea. In this way, his four stages of Christian ar-
chitecture are developed not by considering churches in isolation,
but rather by showing that the first three stages are paralleled in the
architectureof the Jewish diaspora and the cult of Mithras. It is only
in the fourth stage that imperial patronage affects these groups dif-
ferently with respect to their architectures and their destinies.
The secondcontributionof this study in terms of method is that it
successfullycombines the use of several different kinds of archaeo-
logical and textual evidence. Architecture, inscriptions, sectarian
writings, antagonisticpolemics, and elite histories from the ancient
world are drawn together to build a complex argument. This is no
mean feat and provides a model for other studies. The key factor that
makes the integration of a variety of media possible in this case is
the topic. The use and alteration of domestic architecture for reli-
gious purposes is a subject that is addressed in a wide range of mate-
rials, and so a study of this topic can-and must-consider all the
kinds of evidence available.
Third, while White’s method is wide-ranging,it is also intensive.
He chooses particular examples and produces a thick description,
examining the alterations to particular buildings over time and sug-
gesting the implications of these changes. The second volume of the
study is especially important in this regard and deservescomment in
its own right. More than twice as long as the analytical first volume,
the second provides a catalogue of nearly one hundred texts and
buildings that are germane to the topic. The texts are presented in
original languages (mostly Greek and Latin, but also Aramaic and
Syriac) and in English tran~lation.~ The relevant synagogues,
Mithraea, and churches are described in detail, in itself an important
contribution because the secondary literature on these buildings is
scattered throughout numerous journals and books in several lan-
guages and disciplines. This volume includes more than 45 plans
and drawings (many redrawn for this publication) and a bibliogra-
phy for further research. I expect White’s second volume to have a
long life as a reference work on its own, but we should not lose sight
of the fact that his detailed attention to the full range of evidence
also sets a standard by which further work will be measured.
Two questions about White’s method deserve comment here.
The first has to do with the fragmentarynature of the evidenceunder
scrutiny. The number of church buildings known to us from the
early centuries is a very small percentage of the total number that
existed during the period. It is certainly better to follow White’s lead
and examine the evidence we have rather than simply bemoaning
the evidence we do not have. Nevertheless, we need to remember
that we are working with a small sample that might not be represen-
tative. Moreover, we normally know very little about any given city
and so the context of a specific church is often debatable. Finally, it
is never clear what relationship a known church had to the other
churches in its city or town (with the possible exception of Rome in
some cases). Perhaps the known churches are the ones that sur-
vived, growing at the expense of other churches in the city. In that
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
case, the signs of architectural elaboration might not necessarily in-
dicate the growing role of churches in society, but simply the
growing role of that particular church in relation to the other neigh-
boring churches.
A secondmethodologicalquestion has to do with limitingthe ev-
idence. White has chosen to focus on buildings where congrega-
tions assembled and has built his case on this evidence. This is cer-
tainly a defensibledecision, but we must ask whether these limitson
the evidence will lead us to the social origins of Christian architec-
ture. There were other kinds of church structures from the period
under examination that do not fit into the analysis. Christian ceme-
teries, catacombs, martyria, and baptistries all provided opportuni-
ties for Christian architectural expression; the possibility that some
churches used facilities designed for other public meetings (see
Acts 19:9) adds yet another range of evidence for consideration.
Perhaps this evidence would not produce fundamental changes in
White’s conclusions about assembly rooms, but it would lead to a
more complex understandingof the social and ritual implicationsof
developments in Christian architecture.
Turning from a consideration of method, we note that White’s
study is not cast as a theoretical work; although it deals with theories
of early Christian architecture,there is no explicit discussionof the-
ories about religion. Three concluding remarks are in order regard-
ing the implicit theory that undergirds the analysis. First, there is a
salutary effort to recognize regional and local tradition in the shap-
ing of religious institutions. White does not assume that “the
church” built structures; rather, churches adapted or constructed
buildings in the context of local expectations, needs, and resources.
Nor does White assume that his four phases in the development of
church architecture were followed uniformly. He recognizes that
the four stages constitute a modem construct that must be evaluated
against the surviving evidence (1:23-25). This privileging of local
situation, combined with White’s method of detailed description,
results in an analysis that is both powerful and flexible.
My second point highlights the way in which more attention to
theory could strengthen the argument. The primary focus of
White’s two volumes is not on ritual or organization, and mythol-
ogy is almost completely absent from the discussion. White focuses
instead on sacred space (whether Christian, Jewish, or polytheistic)
and uses the analysis of sacred space to move to conclusions about
ritual and institutional organization. The conclusions are normally
cautious, but there are times when connections between space and
ritual or between space and organization are assumed to be too di-
rect. One example is the description of changes to the Sardis syna-
gogue over the course of two or three centuries (1:98-100). The
changes to the building are clear enough, as well as some of the pat-
terns of benefaction that provided funding for these changes. But do
these renovations necessarily show that there was greater formal-
ization of the liturgy? It is very difficult to determine the specific
character of a ritual on the basis of changes to the building in which
the ritual is performed. Rituals may function because of their con-
gruence with their setting, or they may function because of the con-
trast with an incongruent setting. The complex interplay of sacred
space, ritual action, and community organization could be articu-
lated more thoroughly with explicit attention to ritual, organization,
and myth.
A third observation on theory is that White employs a functional
definition of religion. For the purposes of his study, religious insti-
tutions rise and fall because of patronage and benefaction. This may
be true for religious facilities because funding is required to con-
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 23001
struct or remodel a building. Whether religious groups rise and fall
because of patronage and benefaction,however, is a different asser-
tion that can easily lead to a reductionist analysis of religion. For
example, in a discussionof Mithraichalls in the Roman imperialpe-
riod, White notes, “Indeed, the fortunes of any given facility (seen
as long-term growth or decline) are probably correlated with the be-
neficence and motivation of a few leading individuals” (153).
Within a few pages, the growth and adaptation of a Mithraic group
itself is said to be “predicated more on individual acts of patronage
and benefaction than on patterns of conversion or recruitment”(57).
The role of patrons in the evolutionof Mithraism,diaspora Judaism,
or early Christianity should not be overlooked, and White’s study
helps us see this more clearly. Yet the role of patrons in the evolu-
tion of these groups should not be overvalued either; patrons were
only one of the many factors that affected these religious institu-
tions in a variety of ways.
To sum up. The Social Origins of Christian Architecture pre-
sents a creative, disciplined argument about the developmentof the
early churches that is focused specifically on the analysis of the
buildings where Christian congregations assembled. These sacred
spaces are examined diachronically to understand the history of the
architecture and are compared to contemporary buildings of other
movements to understand the social dynamics at work. White
pushes the limits of the available evidencein the best sense: he gath-
ers as much data as possible in hopes of learning as much as possi-
ble. The result is a study that challenges our understanding of the
early churches in several ways and moves the scholarly conversa-
tion forward.
The three essays that follow suggest directions the conversation
might go from here. The first deals with issues in the comparison of
religious groups, the second with architectural settings for their
meetings, and the third with the people who composed these groups.
Notes
1. The two volumes have an unusual publication history that begins with the au-
thor’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Domus Ecclesiae-Domus Dei: Adaptation and Develop-
ment in the Setting for Early Christian Assembly” (Yale University, 1982). Volume
one was originally published for the American Schools of Oriental Research as
Building God’s House in the Roman World: Architectural Adaptation among Pa-
gans, Jews, and Chrisiians (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) with
the expectation that the companion volume would soon appear as The Christian
Domus Ecclesiae and Its Environment:A Collection of Texts and Monumenis (Har-
vard Theological Studies 36; Minneapolis:Fortress Press, 1990). Unexpected delays
resulted from the participation of two publishing houses, so that the most expedient
solution was finally to issue both volumes as the 42nd installment in the Harvard
Theological Studies series.
2. The essays are based on a panel discussion organized by the “Archaeology of
Religion in the Greco-Roman World Group” for the 1998 AnnualMeeting of the So-
ciety of Biblical Literature.
3. The only exception is that New Testament references are listed. but the texts
are not included.
2. Buildin God’s House and the
K
Arriva of a New Religion
Reviewer: Edgar Krentz
Lutheran School of Theology
Chicago, IL 60615
hite’s two volumes are a major contribution to our under-
standing of the history of the earliest Christian church.
Religious Studies Review / %35
They are a signal accomplishment,breaking much new ground pre-
cisely because they do not begin with a rereading of literary texts.
Rather, White reads another set of ancient data: the material re-
mains-so far as they can be identified-of early Christian archi-
tecture. He traces the structural development of worship centers,
using the similar architectural development of synagogues and
Mithraea as control data (all identified as “private cults” in contrast
to civic or imperial cults). In the second volume, he adds epigraphic
and papyrological texts alongside literary materials. In both vol-
umes, drawings of remodeled structuresenable the reader to follow
the arguments. White has shown that these private cults often begin
with groups meeting in individual homes (house church, 1:103-10).
advance to modifying a house for cultic purposes (domus ecclesiae,
1:111-23). and finally to remodelling a cultic structure completely
or constructing one de novo (basilica, temple, synagogue,
1:123-39). His discussion fills a gap in standard earlier works
(Snyder 1985.67-82; Milburn 1988.8-18,83-144).Forthat weowe
Michael White a debt of gratitude.The collection of texts in volume
two provides materialfor study that will long be a standardsource.
White introduces his work with an argument to support his con-
centrationon worship spaces as a guide to understandingthe growth
of early Christianity: ‘The history of the early Christian movement
cannot be written without addressing the fact that growth, worship,
theology, ethics-in short, every aspect of religion in human expe-
rience-were centered in communal experience, in assembly”
(1:3). I do not quarrel with that statement overmuch, but I do want to
note that it has an eminentlyJewish or Christian slant in its stress on
theology and ethics. Religion in the Greco-Roman world did not
claim to account for the nature of god(s) or to concentrate on the in-
culcation of ethics. As the collection of essays in Pagan Priests: Re-
ligion and Power in the Ancient World (Beard and North 1990)
makes clear, the function of the priest (and so of religion) was to
manage power. Prayer, sacrifice,and augury were the major modes
of doing this (Beard 1990.34-40; Ogilvie 1969.24-69). “Roman re-
ligion was concerned with success not with sin” (Ogilvie 1969, 17).
The teaching of ethics and the discussion of the nature of the gods
were the realm of literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. It was, after
all, Cicero who wrote De natura deorum. and Lucretius (following
Epicurus) and the Stoics who placed theology into tofusikon meros
of philosophy. Philosophic discussion had dealt with ethics at least
since Sacrates. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Cynics, even Skep-
tics discussedethical questions. Seneca wrote Epistulae morales ad
Lucullum to inculcate ethics. In short, one might ask whether identi-
fying the philosophic school as the parallel to the early Christian
place of assembly might not be as justified as looking at the syna-
gogue and the Mithraeum. That question suggests one should ask
how the internal arrangements of early Christian cultic centers were
adapted for teaching. Did the noncultic basilica ultimately become
the model for post-Constantinian churches because it was suited to
teaching?
But given White’s starting point, the direction of the argument is
set. We might want to ask, however, whether White casts his net
widely enough. Do we not need to set alongside this collection par-
allel materials from earliest Christianity to check the validity of
White’s argument? I am thinking here of materials gathered by
Snyder in Ante Pacem (1989, Milbum in Early Christian Art and
Architecture (1988). and, more recently, by Finney, The Invisible
God: The Earliest Christians on Art (1994). These writers call at-
tention to a wide range of artistic objects from which one might also
draw inferences about the social origins of Christianity, especially
226 / R e ~ o usstudies Review
since the visual and plastic arts were often associated with cultic
centers (e.g., in the three house units dedicated to YHWH, Mithras,
and Jesus, along the city wall in Dura Europos).
We might also ask how new religions entered an area. We can
distinguish at least three, and possibly four, modes by which this
happened. The first is well known-at least two “new” religions
came to Rome by invitation. In these cases, the Roman Senate dem-
onstrated “state” control over the introduction of a new goddess.
The action of the Senate caused Kybele. the magna muter, to come
to Rome in 204 BCE on the basis of a presumed prophecy in the Sib-
ylline Oracles. (The story is told in Livy 29.10-14; Ovid Fasti
4.178ff.; Arnobius Adv. Nat. 7.49; and Varro, De lingua Lutina
6.15.) A five-person embassy went to Asia (Pergamum) or Galatia
(Pessinus?)to bring to Rome the black stone identified with Kybele
(celebratediconographicallyon an altar-Leipholdt 1966,fig. 84).
Housed at first in the temple of Victory, she received her own tem-
ple on the Palatine Hill in 191BCE (Beard 1990,31).Despite having
introduced Kybele to Rome, the Senate later prevented Roman
males from becoming castrated priests in her service (Ferguson
1970,27-28,and, especially, Vermaseren 1977,38-41).The Senate
also controlled the spread of Dionysiac (Bacchic) cults in Italy in
213 and 186 BCE.
The case of Asklepios is a second example. In 293 BCE a plague
broke out in Rome, and the Sibylline Oracles were interpreted to
mean that Asklepios should be brought to Rome. An embassy to
Epidauros brought him back in the person of a sacred snake. (See
Valerius Maximus 1.8.2; cf. Livy, Epitome 11.) Later legend sug-
gested that the snake, when let loose, landed on the Isola Tiberi, thus
determining the site of the temple dedicated on 1 January 291 BCE
(Livy 110.47.7, in Edelstein and Edelstein 1945, no. 583). In other
cases, grateful patients spread the cult of Asklepios (Edelstein
1945,2.319-22).
Some religions were artificially created. The case of Alexander
of Abonouteichos is the most famous. After Alexander created a
cultic center, complete with a statue of his god, a combination of
presumed oracularpronouncementsand miraculous Occurrences at-
tracted worshippers to the new cult. Fictive religion was based on
demonstrationsof power and the creation of an aura of mystery.
The third type of religious emigration is what interests
White-the migration and growth of “private cults.” In this context
he primarily describes three cults: early Christianity, Judaism, and
Mithraism (and, to some degree, the worship of Isis). White’s ar-
chaeological data are persuasive and enlightening with regard to
these cults. Worshippersbegin to gather in small cells in houses; the
assemblies gradually expand. At some point a domus is purchased
and modified so that it ceases to be a private home and becomes a
cult center. There was no attempt, as far as can be discovered ar-
chaeologically, to identify those cultic centers on the exterior, no
“signboards” in front of the church. Many of these groups eventu-
ally go public, with clearly identifiable cultic centers, e.g., Isis on
Delos and in Pompeii. But their temples seem to stay located in
close proximity to houses, not in civic or cultic centers. All of this
evidence is quite persuasive to me.
Nonetheless some questions arise, although not all can be an-
swered. How far back can we project the data chronologically?
White’s evidence cannot demonstratethat a structure was cultic un-
less some kind of iconography or structural data makes it likely. He
has surviving material evidence of this sort from the second and
third centuries, but can we project his conclusionsback to an earlier
period?
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
I agree with what White says about the social status of early
Christians. The village Jesus may indeed have concentrated his
ministry on the marginalized, the poor, and the social outcasts. But
early Christianity, even Jewish Christianity, was an urban phenom-
enon. Thepolis was its home in the east, the urbs in the west. Was it
possible for it to make this movement without some wealthier ad-
herents? Robert Jewett (1993) argues that in Rome Christian house
churches were insula churches, that is, communities meeting in Ro-
man apartment houses. He does not cite any archaeologicaldata, ei-
ther as to the possible size of such gathered communities or evi-
dence of cultic centers in such insulae. The identifiable cultic
centers in Rome that may be this early (e.g., the domus Clementis)
do not support this claim. White does cite the titulus Byzanris at
Rome as an example of an insula over which the basilica SS.
Giovanni e Paolo was erected c. 400 CE (1:112-14; 2:213-18;
Snyder 1985,77-80). It originated as a commercial structure with-
out any clear Christian architectural features, was modified around
250 CE, and contains Christian frescoes dated to the early fourth
century. Thus, the evidence for insula gatherings is unclear. But can
they therefore be ruled out as a possibility?
How early do we find more than one cult center of the same reli-
gion in a single city? We find multiple churches after Constantine,
e.g., in Gerasa in the transJordan. What evidence is there even in
Rome itself? Double basilicas appear soon after Constantine, e.g.,
in Aquileia and Geneva. Do they indicate more successfulChristian
communities than in cities without double basilicas?
Does the evidencewe have reflect only successfulcommunities?
Is the domus center of worship evidence of social origins or merely
of community size? Indeed, the expense of modifying houses for
worship (as the three at Dura Europos) suggests communities of
some wealth and therefore of status (1: 141). But wealth is not the
only-or even the most important-mark of status in the Roman
world. Family (i.e., ancestry) was even more important. Here
White’s list of personal names and titles (2506- 18) is an invaluable
resource that deserves careful prosopographic interpretation.
Aurelius Neilus (Ammonius)of Oxyrhynchus was a member of the
city council and a prytanis (member of the state executive body);
Gaius Julius Nestorianus of Pisidian Antioch was a senator.Perhaps
we should consider Christian benefactors who provide a house as
similar to other Greeks and Romans who built and maintained
house temples as private worship centers. Does not the extensive
list of donors suggest that?
Again, did these three religions grow by emigratiodimmigration
or by conversion? Is the presence of at least fifteen Mithraic shrines
in Ostia evidence of mass conversion, or of the entry of ethnic
groups into the military (Meiggs 1973, 170)? Meiggs argues that
these structures do not suggest great wealth (172). Can architectural
history answer such questions? The Roman villa at Lullingstone in
England had a Christian chapel of its own sometime in the fourth
century (1: 115-17; 2:243-57). Is that evidence of conversion or of
the influence of Constantinian political influence? It may suggest
that migrating religions first arrived as familial cults that built pri-
vate places of worship, parallel perhaps to the lararia (shrinesfor the
lares) of Roman houses and the garden shrines of Greek or Roman
houses. Such cults may not have actively missionized but grew
from the migration of devotees of that religion.
White’s work is impressive. That it raises so many issues is a
mark of its excellence. He has marshaled an extensive array of evi-
dence, both archaeological and epigraphic, to support his theory
that the Christian cultic center developed from the house church to
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
the domus ecclesiae (a house modified internally to provide wor-
ship space) to the aula ecclesiae, a building constructed from the
foundation up for Christian cult. While some aspects of his conclu-
sions about the societal implications appear questionable, this will
be a standard work of reference for years to come.
3. The Basilica Privutu and the
Origins of Christian Architecture:
Finding the Right Stones to Build God’s House
Reviewer: Ulrike Outschar
Osterreichisches Kulturinstitut
Koybasi Cad. 44, TR-80870 Yenikoy
Istanbul, Turkey
T his brief essay is intended as a stimulus to further collabora-
tive research along the lines laid out by Michael White in The
Social Origins of Christian Architecture. My disciplinary per-
spective is that of a classical archaeologist,and the goal of this essay
is to highlight another aspect of residential buildings-the private
basilica-that could be important for the origins of Christian archi-
tecture in urban settings, especially in the cities of the eastern Ro-
man Empire. These considerations are prompted by archaeological
excavations of insulae in the city center of Ephesos; they expand
upon the work of Hermann Vetters, the excavator of the insulue and
former director of the Ephesos excavations. (An insula was a build-
ing complex that contained,several residential units and normally
covered a full city block. They were often multistoried apartment
buildings for low-income populations. The Ephesian slope houses,
however, were built for some of the wealthiest inhabitants of the
city,)
We begin, however, with literary evidence from the sixth book
of Vitruvius’s disquisition on architecture written in the last quarter
of the first century BCE.The sixth book is dedicated to the construc-
tion of private houses (uedificia privuta). His discussion indicates
that he was dealing with houses for elite segments of society, so we
should probably think in terms of what we call today the upper or
upper middle class. The book is organized in three sections: chap-
ters 1-5 on houses in city settings; chapter 6 on country estates; and
chapter 7 on Greek residential complexes. Then there is an excursus
dedicated to rooms below ground level, pillars, and buildings con-
structed on top of vaults and arches.
Vitruvius did not deal specifically with insulae. In the fifth chap-
ter, however, he turned his attention to the arrangement of rooms
designated for the private use of householders, beginning by con-
trasting the needs of aristocrats and common people with regard to
public and private areas within their houses:
1. When we have arranged our plan with a view to aspect, we must
go on to consider how, in private buildings, the rooms belonging to
the family, and how those which are shared with visitors, should be
planned. For into the private rooms no one can come uninvited, such
as the bedrooms, dining-rooms, baths and other apartments which
have similar purposes. The common rooms are those into which,
though uninvited, persons of the people can come by right, such as
vestibules, courtyards, peristyles and other apartments of similar
uses. Therefore magnificent vestibules and alcoves and halls are not
necessary to persons of a common fortune, because they pay their re-
spects by visiting among others, and are not visited by others.
Religious Studies Review / 227
2. But those who depend upon country produce must have stalls for
cattle and shops in the forecourt, and, within the main building, cel-
lars, barns, stores and other apartments which are for the storage of
produce rather than for elegant effect. Again, the houses of bankers
and fanners of the revenue should be more spacious and imposing
and safe from burglars. Advocates and professors of rhetoric should
be housed with distinction, and in sufficient space to accommodate
their audiences. For persons of high rank who hold office and magis-
tracies, and whose duty it is to serve the state, we must provide
princely vestibules, lofty halls and very spacious peristyles, planta-
tions and broad avenues finished in a majestic manner; further, li-
braries and basilicas arranged in a similar fashion with the
magnificence of public structures, because, in such palaces, public
deliberations and private trials and judgments are often transacted
(De architecfura VI, 5, 1-2; Loeb translation by Frank Granger).
In reference to this section in Vitruvius, Vetters wrote,
For our purposes this sentence is surprising and important: ...
praeterea bybliothecas, pinacothecas, basilicas non dissimili modo
quam publicorum operum magnifcentia cornparatas, quod in
domibus eorum saepius et publica consilia et privata iudicia
arbitriaque conjiciuntur. If one surveys the literature on the subject,
one finds that the existence of such private basilicas is known on the
basis of the Vitruvius passage, but there is no clear understanding of
what the term means.. ..
Reference is always made to imperial palaces or late antique villas of
the rulers of the Empire. But Book 5 of Vitruvius was written after
27 BCE and so there must already have been private basilicas at the
beginning of the Principate. Cicero’s comment (adArticum 11.14.2,
from April 23, 59 BCE) is not relevant here, for the rhetorician and
politician compared his villa in Formiae to a market basilica only be-
cause both had such a throng of daily visitors. This conclusion
should not preclude that Cicero’s villa may have had such basili-
cas.. ..
Now, however, the excavations carried out near the embolos in
Ephesos since 1960 demonstrate that this kind of great hall-with
exedra or apse-was sometimes erected even in an extrava-
gantly-built insula (1978,213).
Two Ephesian insulae are important here. Both are located in the
center of the city on the slope of Biilbiildag behind the late Hellenis-
tic funerary monuments near the west end of Kuretes street. In the
eastern insula, known as slope house I, a large hall occupies an im-
portant place in the domus (Lang-Auinger et al. 1996;for a plan, see
also Scherrer 1995,106-107). (The term “slope house” is used for
both of these complexes in Ephesos, even though each included
more than one residential unit.) The hall and its adjoining rooms
form a complex that is sometimes called a banquet house
(Banketthaus) in recent literature. The banquet house was the result
of renovations in the northwestern side of the insula that took place
in the early second century CE. In the western insula (slope house 2),
another hall is crucial in the design of residential unit 6 on the lower
building terrace, While the eastern insula contains one extensive
domus, the larger western insula is composed of originally inde-
pendent residential units that were gradually arranged in pairs on
three terraces. Even though they eventually formed one unified
insula, these units can all be traced back to the tradition of the Greek
peristyle house, and they remained basically intact (through numer-
ous renovations) from the late first century BCE until the late third or
early fourth century CE.
A dramatic change occurred in the use of the western insula (i.e.,
slope house 2) in the mid-third to mid-fourth century CE,probably
as a result of the earthquakes of 262 and 3691370 CE, which are at-

tested by epigraphicand numismatic finds. The deterioratingcondi-
tions of late antiquity led to the installation of various workshops in
areas of the insulu. Some of the residential units were crudely
adapted for the workshops, and sometimes the shops were built di-
rectly on top of leveled debris.
In the south, the houses of the insulu extend to the street. Here the
terraces cut deep into the mountain to make optimum use of the
steeply sloped terrain. For this reason, only the moms of the upper
stories lie above ground level in this part of the insulu. On the mid-
dle and lower terraces, communicationbetween the different levels
is accomplished mostly through ground-level entrances from the
ascending side streets. Along the northeastern edge of the insulu,
small shops are integrated into the complex; they are oriented to-
ward Kuretes street.
Excavations on residential unit 6 in slope house 2 began in the
late 1960sbut were not completed until the early 1980s. This house
is exceptionalbecause of its size (the ground floor is 950 square me-
ters), its floor plan, and the inscriptionpreserved in the peristyle that
refers to C. Flavius Furius Aptus, the presumed owner of residential
unit 6 during the late second century CE.In his house, the two-story
peristyle prepared the visitor for an imposing constellation of
rooms, some of which are in an axial alignment. From the peristyle,
one could enter either the rooms oriented axially on the west and
north sides or the irregular rooms to the south-an impressive hall
outfitted with marble revetment (H2/31) that provides access to a
basilica privutu (H2/8) to the southwest via a small, cross-vaulted
atrium (H2/36).
Furius Aptus was a member of the small circle of leading citizens
in Ephesos. He served at least once as the sponsor of the Ephesian
Olympics (ulyturch) and from the inscription found in the peristyle
(on the rim of a basin for a fountain) we know that he was a priest of
Dionysos Oreios. His role in the Dionysos cult was probably the
reason for the decorative themes of the vaulted ceiling in a small
room off the much larger private basilica. The geometric design on
the vaulted ceiling was populated by characters from the thiusos of
Dionysos (procession singing and dancing in honor of the god), and
the figures above the door may portray the marriage of the god to
Ariadne; they are flanked by erotes (figures representing love).
These archaeological finds clearly demonstrate the high social sta-
tus and religious responsibilities of an elite male from the Severan
period.
Both of these private basilicas and their attendant atriums were
integral parts of large residential complexes from at least the late
first century CE. Vetters ascribed a necessary relationship between
the basilicas and the grandly outfitted “side rooms,” which he iden-
tified as the pinucothecu (picture gallery) and upothecu (store-
house) mentioned by Vitruvius: “Since slope houses 1 and 2 clearly
take us into the private sphere of the elite citizenry, these rooms
could only have served private purposes, i.e., those which Vitruvius
described in the context of private dwellings.” Vetters had already
come to this conclusion in 1978, before the discovery of the Furius
Aptus inscription in the peristyle court of residential unit 6 in slope
house 2. “All of the various rooms of an urban villa-the vestibulu,
c u v a , a e d i u m , p e r i s t y l i u , as well as b u s i l i c u e and
....
pinucothecue-are present in this mansion If my conclusion is
correct, then in these two great halls we have the first known exam-
ples of busilicue privutue in residential buildings” (1978).
It is possible that both of these private basilicas were used for fes-
tive meals. Since the inscription from residential unit 6 refers to the
(probable) owner as a priest of Dionysos, and since the Dionysian
Volume 27 Number 3 / JUhl2001
themes of the decoration in the so-called “stucco room” are proba-
bly related to his religious office, the rooms may have been used,
among other functions, for gatherings and banquets for initiates in
the cult. Moreover, some specialists refer to the domus of slope
house 1 as a banquet hall that may have been used for the gatherings
of a religious association. Finally, related inscriptions-which
come mostly from this area of the city-all assume the existence of
buildings necessary for banquets somewhere in this part of the city
center. Thus, it is not unlikely that the buildings were used for such
private gatherings that also had a certain public function.
The evidence at our disposal does not warrant a theory of direct
developmentfrom private basilica to Christian church,but basilicas
such as these-which were entered through an atrium and provided
space for meetings, gatherings, and communal meals-may have
played a role in the evolution of early church assembly halls. If this
is the case, the social origins of Christian architectureare not to be
found in a single structural genre. We may be dealing instead with a
more complicated social history that involved several types of
buildings, one of which has been illuminated by White’s important
study.
4. House Churches and the
Demographics of Diversity
Reviewer: Carolyn Osiek
Catholic Theological Union
Chicago, IL 60615
I
f the titles of other comments offered here, taken from the subti-
tle of White’s work, are “Building God’s House and the Arrival
of a New Religion” and “Finding the Right Stones to Build
God’s House,” the title of this section should be “Building God’s
House with Different-Sized Stones.” In keeping with the intent of
the original panel discussion, I will not so much critique White’s
book as move beyond it in a specific direction.
I was recently in Syria with a group of people, among whom was
an architect. As we explored a marvelous and well-preserved an-
cient structure, I asked her what she saw when she looked at these
stones. She answered that she saw how the buildings were put to-
gether. I, on the other hand, saw what people were doing in them.
My concern is not so much with the material structures themselves
as with how people filled the spaces. About this question, we have
little informationwith regard to house churches. My comments will
explorethe different directionsin which such an inquiry might go.
The churches of any given city or region would presumably have
included a social mix. Clearly there were family groups, including
children of all ages. Many slave members of Christian households
were also believers, but apparently not all. There is evidenceof con-
versions of entire households but also of slaves from Christian
householdsjoining the church later by personal decision: for exam-
ple, in the early third century, Hippolytus’sApostolic Tradition (15 )
gives different procedures for admission to catechetical instruction
for slaves of Christian and non-Christian owners. It directs that a
slave of a believer seeking admission to baptismal instruction must
have his master’s permission (why the permission of a Christian
master cannot be assumed would be another interesting discussion)
and testimony as to his good character, while the slave of a nonbe-
liever does not require such permission but must be taught to be
pleasing to his master. There must have been other church members
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001
without their families, men and women, free persons and slaves,
those who had joined independently of their household and often
suffereddomestic conflict because of their choice. Persons in mixed
marriages, both men and women (1 Cor 7: 12-13), may have occa-
sionally wanted to bring the unbelieving spouse along (1 Cor
14:16).After the first generation, there must have been widowed el-
derly without believing families. This is especially true in the case
of widowed women, who in various times and places formed with
their children an identifiable group of the especially needy, but also
became a kind of serviceorganization to carry out some of the chari-
table operations of the church. Each of these groupings would have
had different expectations and different pastoral needs.
A variety of trades and professions must also be assumed. Once
again, the Apostolic Tradition (16) gives us a glimpse of the differ-
ent kinds of people who might seek to become believers but about
whom there would be problems: brothel keepers, sculptors, paint-
ers, actors, teachers, charioteers, gladiators or gladiator instructors,
priests of other religions, soldiers, and city magistrates, most of
whom must abandon their work or be rejected by the church. Prosti-
tutes, pimps, eunuchs, magicians, charmers, astrologers, interpret-
ers of dreams, con men, and makers of phylacteries were not to be
considered for baptism at all. Slave concubines who have been
faithful wives and mothers are to be admitted, but keepers of concu-
bines must contract a valid marriage. Alongside this colorful list of
different types, most of whom would have to give up their work to
be admitted as catechumens, we can assume the whole range of less
interesting occupations: builders, carpenters, bakers, cooks, hair
dressers, merchants, tailors, seamstresses, and the like.
What about ethnic and cultural diversity? At least since La
Piana’s studies (1927), we have been aware of the literary and ar-
chaeological evidence of the Orontes flowing into the Tiber. While
Rome may have been the most ethnically diverse city of the ancient
Mediterranean world because of its important place in immigration
patterns, every urban center must have been characterized by ethnic
and cultural diversity resulting from migration and trade. Christian
communities could be expected to follow normal demographic pat-
lerns. except, of course, that there would be a proportionally larger
representation of people of Jewish origin. The conflict between Jew
and Gentile in early Christianity must be seen more as a cultural
problem than a theological one, and the tensions it caused in actual
communities must have been experienced as more cultural than
theological. These conditions remind us that ethnic and cultural di-
versity existed at the very heart of Christian origins.
Racial diversity was also a factor. Lighter-skinned Italians and
barbarians from the North mixed freely with the darker-skinned in-
habitants of Egypt, Ethiopia, and further to the south in Africa. The
work of Snowden (1970) and Hood (1 994) has shown the presence
of black Africans in the Mediterranean countries for centuries be-
fore the common era. The presence of Simon Niger in the Antioch
community (Acts 13:l) tells us that what we would now call racial
diversity was a component of Christian communities from the start.
The same studies have also revealed that projections identifying
blacks with excessive eroticism and evil predate the Christian era
and that even though no evidence of ideas of racial superiority or in-
feriority can be found in early Christianity or its surrounding envi-
ronment, still the imagery of white as pure and black as soiled was
inevitably transferred from skin color to ethical notions. Evidence
of these attitudes begins to surface soon in early Christianity, espe-
cially in the ascetic traditions (Barn. 4.9; Acts Thom. 55.64; Pass.
Religious Studies Review / 229
Bart. 7; in the desert ascetical literature, demons frequently appear
as ugly black men or boys).
Besides diversity of familial status, culture, and ethnicity. it is
also evident that from the earliest years theological diversity led to
divisiveness within communities. One person’s heresy is another’s
graced insight. Movements later branded heretical or schismatic all
began as new ideas and practices within specific communities of
life and worship. Names like Marcion, Valentinus, Marcella,
Hippolytus, and Heracleon recall some of the major theological
conflicts. Already in the Pauline churches there were ways of think-
ing that were experienced as divisive. Paul never tires of pleading
for communion in the face of what he perceives as unhealthy dissen-
sion (e.g., 1 Cor 1:lO-17; 2 Cor 5:16-21; Gal 1:6-9; Phil 2:1-18).
Our imaginative reconstructions of early church life sometimes as-
sume a homogeneity that is not supported by a careful examination
of the evidence.
Yet another kind of diversity needs to be considered. White care-
fully lays out the evidence for different kinds of structures in which
worship may have taken place and then theorizes about the changes
and transformations that took place in those structures. In the early
years, there are indications that Christians would meet in a domus
(free-standing house), a schole (rented hall), or a horreum (ware-
house): we hypothesize that, since great numbers of less than afflu-
ent people lived in apartment houses (insulae),Christians also met
there. It would be interesting if we could show that meetings in the
domus came slightly later than gatherings in other less impressive
surroundings; that would suggest a growth in the social standing of
the members. But some of the earliest evidence, from the letters of
Paul, suggests that gathering in someone’s oikos was already hap-
pening at a very early point (1 Cor 16:19), and from what I am able
to gather, the term oikos was not likely to have been applied to a unit
in the multistoried apartment houses that the Romans called
insulae.
Diversity of venue of the Christian gathering in Greco-Roman
cities was therefore present from the start. That diversity may also
have produced diversity of style and proceeding in the assembly. In
the case of a meeting in someone’s household, it is difficult to imag-
ine any other leadership structure than presidency by the kyrios or
kyria of the household, with the exception, of course, of times when
a founding apostle was present. At a gathering in rentedor borrowed
space ordinarily used for some other purpose, the same hierarchical
ordering would not be apparent, so perhaps these assemblies in less
formal circumstances were characterized by a more fluid structure
and a more participatory leadership. Was Chloe’s group (1 Cor
1:11)one such gathering, under the leadershipof a woman of undis-
tinguished birth? Or were they, as Robert Jewett (1993) has sug-
gested, a household of Christians without the lady head of the house
being a member of the church? In that case, where and how would
they have met?
This question of structure and organization of the assembly
raises the issue of patronal titles. Synagogues gave such designa-
tions as mother or father of the synagogue, which are generally as-
sumed to be titles not of religious leadership but of patronage. Why
do we find no titles among Christians other than those of recognized
religious leadership, roles such as apostle, prophet, teacher,
episkopos, presbyter, and deacon? The answer is not simply that by
the time of the first Christian inscriptions, ecclesiastical organiza-
tion was more advanced. Some of the synagogue inscriptions with
such titles are from the third and fourth centuries, the time at which
we begin to have identifiably Christian inscriptions. Probably, as
230 / Religious Studies Review
William Countryman (1980) and Harry Maier (1991) have sug-
gested, by the time of the appearance of Christian inscriptions, the
episcopate was sufficiently consolidated to have absorbed all pa-
tronage. Slightlyearlier, in the first part of the third century, the Ap-
osrolic Tradition of Hippolytus, as exegeted by Charles Bobertz
(1993), alludes to some remaining vestiges of individual patronage,
specificallya patron’s hosting of needy members of the church for a
meal. By the end of that century, however, all help to the needy was
channeled through a central church organization. One element of
diversity had ceased, even as others multiplied.
At least by the middle of the third century, a new place of assem-
bly was developing: the domus ecclesiae, or residential building re-
modeled to facilitate worship by removing walls to create a long
rectangular hall for the community gathering. The clearest remain-
ing evidence is, of course,the house church at Dura-Europos;White
scours the Mediterranean world for others as well. He states that as
long as the assembly was centered on a table, the hall did not de-
velop (2.23). This is probably true, but it is worth asking what was
cause and what was effect. Did separation from the context of a
meal lead naturally to the domus ecclesiae with its worship hall, or
did increasing numbers and organizational self-consciousnesslead
to the use of the hall and therefore to the separationof worship from
the context of the meal?
Presumably in the meal setting, participants sat or, perhaps ini-
tially, reclined. Early in the use of the hall, they may also have sat,
only later in the basilica adopting the standing position. In what
kinds of configurations were they placed? I think our imagination
pictures family groupings in the house church eating together, while
THEPLACE OF THE
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Karl Ludwig Schmidt
Translated by
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With this translation of Karl Ludwig Schmidt’s classic
work, Byron R. McCane enables a new generation of
English-speaking scholars to engage with Schmidt’s
contention that the gospels represent a literary genre that
-
does not derive from others in the ancient world.
atu
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800-768-2500 803-777-5243 FAX: 800-868-0740
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envisioning segregation by sex in the hall church. Yet we know that
traditional custom segregated wives from husbands in formal din-
ing, either by separate tables or couches,or even sometimes in sepa-
rate rooms. If children were present at all, they went with the
women. This custom was apparently changing in more romanized
environmentsby the first century, so that wives and husbands dined
together more frequently. Among Eastern non-elites, the mingling
of the sexes was probably much slower in coming, if it came at all. It
may well be, therefore, that throughout the early Christian centu-
ries, most families never participated in the Lord’s Supper side by
side, either in the context of meal or hall assembly.
With the advent of the hall for worship, men and women may not
have been across the aisle from each other as we would envision but
segregated in front and back. The late third-century Didascalia
(White 2:78-83, #18) details the placement of various groups:
bishop and presbyters in the apse, farthest to the east, with one dea-
con assisting at the altar, men in front facing the altar, and women
behind them, with another deacon at the door to supervise entry.
The very young and very old also had their special places, still sexu-
ally segregated,as did mothers with babies. In an unusual sharing of
familial responsibility, children are to be with their fathers or their
mothers, standing on the side. Other documents specify the pres-
ence of widows or female deacons somewhere toward the front.
The Didascalia suggests constant movement in a sta-
tus-sensitive environment, with the deacon serving as a cross be-
tween usher and bouncer; when someone enters and finds no seat,
the deacon must oust someone of lesser importance or lesser age to
stand. Some communities had deaconesses who supervised the
women and performed that duty in the women’s section. Through-
out the liturgy, the deacon in the Didascalia is to ensure appropriate
behavior and decorum-no whispering, sleeping, laughing, or ges-
turing. If someone of worldly importance enters and finds no seat,
the bishop is to preserve his dignity and do nothing himself, relying
on the good sense of the deacon and the rest of the congregation. If,
however, a poor person, man or woman, enters and finds no place,
the bishop himself must provide it, even if he has to sit on the floor.
In the spirit of James 2:l-7, the poor take primacy of place. The
touchingdescription of the bishop’s role with regard to the poor per-
son is of course rhetorical, but it also implies a fairly small gather-
ing, in which congregational movement is plainly visible from the
front.
It is rather surprisingthat the Didascalia so clearly says that most
of the congregation sat. This would presumably be for the liturgy of
the word, while they would stand for the liturgy of the altar. We are
by this time well out of a meal context and into a large gathering
with careful positioning of different categories of participants, the
congregation all facing east. The arrangement places women be-
hind men, not across from them, which suggests a long narrow
space rather than a wide one. What kinds of gestures would have
been expected of the congregation?Is the appearance of the orans
figure in Christian art at about the end of the second century an indi-
cation of actual gestures of prayer at this time? Yet this position of
prayer may have been in Christian use much earlier;cf. 1Tim2:8.
The orans with uplifted arms is one of the earliest distinctiveim-
ages to emerge in Christian art, along with the dove, anchor, and
palm branch. It usually but not always depicts a woman. As some
kind of cultural and probably religious gesture,representation of the
orans is far older, known even in Minoan and Cycladic art. It is pos-
sible that its appearancein Christian representation signals a shift in
some places from sitting to standing at the assembly. The appear-
Volume 27 Number 3 / July WO1 Religious s t d i e s Review/ a31

ance of the orans in Western Christian art predates by perhaps JEWETT,ROBERT

three-quarters of a century the textual evidence for sitting at wor- 1993 “Tenement Churches and Communal Meals in the Early
ship in the East as described in the Didascalia. This may indicate Church: The Implications of a Form-Critical Analysis of
another aspect of diversity, a possible difference of worship posi- 2 Thessalonians 3: 10.” Biblical Research 38: 23-43.
tion between East and West; the difference today is reversed, of KRAUTHEIMERRICHARD
course, with worshippers generally sitting in the West and standing 1986 Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture. Penguin.
in the East. All this suggests that our image of the earliest believers LANG-AUINGER,
CLAUDIA, ET AL.
sitting or reclining at table for eucharist may not be the whole pic- 1996 Hanghaus I in Ephesos: Der Baubefund. Forschungen in
ture. Ephesos 8.3. Osterreichisches Archhologisches Institut.
These are some aspects of diversity that are worth considering LA PIANA,
GEORGE
when we look at how the spaces of early Christian churches were 1927 “Foreign Groups in Ancient Rome.” Harvard Theological
used. They remind us that both differences and problems with those Review 2 0 1 8 3 4 3 .
differences existed inside the buildings from the beginning. W e are
grateful to Michael White for the monumental work h e has done to LEIFOLDT,JOHANNES
1966 Urnwelt des UrchristentumsIll: Bilder urn
further these discussions.
neutestamentlichen&italter. Berlin: Evangelische
Verlagsanstalt.
References
MAIER,HARRY 0.
BEARD,MARY 199 1 The Social Setting of the Ministry as Reflected in the
1990 “Priesthood in the Roman Republic.” In Beard and North, Writings of Hermas, Clement, and Ignatius. Wilfrid
19-48. Laurier University Press.
BEARD,MARY,AND JOHNNORTH(EDs.) MEIGCS,RUSSELL
1990 Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient World. 21973 Roman Ostia. Clarendon.
Cornell University Press. MILBURN,
ROBERT
BOBERTZ,
CHARLESA. 1988 Early Christian Art and Architecture. University of Cali-
1993 “The Role of Patron in the Cena Dominica of Hippolytus’ fornia Press.
Apostolic Tradition. ” Journal of Theological Studies 44: OGILVIE,R. M.
170-84. The Romans and Their Gods in the Age of Augustus.
1969
L. WILLIAM
COUNTRYMAN, Chatto & Windus.
1980 The Rich Christian in the Church of the Early Empire: PETER(ED.)
SCHERRER,
Contradictions and Accommodations. Edwin Mellen. 1995 Ephesos: Der Neue Fuhrer. Osterreichisches
EDELSTEIN,EMMA J. AND LUDWIG Archaologisches Institut.
1945, 1998 Asclepius: A Collection and Interpretation of the SNOWDEN,
FRANKM., JR.
Testimonies. Johns Hopkins University Press. 1970 Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Ex-
FAGAN,GARRETTG. perience. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
1999 Bathing in Public in the Roman World. University of SNYDER,GRAYDON
Michigan Press. 1985 Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Be-
FERGUSON,
JOHN fore Constantine. Mercer University Press.
1970 The Religions ofthe Roman Empire. Cornell University VERMASEREN,
MAARTIN J.
Press. 1977 Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult. Thames and
FINYEY, PAULCORBEY Hudson.
1994 The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art. Oxford VETTERS,
HERMANN
University Press. 1978 “Basilica Privata.” In G. Schwarz and E.Pochmarski
HOOD,ROBERTE. (eds.), Classica et Provincialia: FestschrifrfUr E m
1994 Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditionson Blacks and Diet& 21 1-17. Graz: Akademische Druck- u.
Blackness. Fortress. Verlagsanstalt.
232 / Religious Studies Review Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001

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Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001
WALTER BRUEGGEMANN AND JAMES
BARR: OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY AND
INCLUSIVITY
THEOLOGY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT: TESTIMONY,
DISPUTE, ADVOCACY
By Walter Brueggemann
Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997
Pp.xiii + 777. $48.00.
THE CONCEPT OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY: AN OLD
TESTAMENT PERSPECTIVE
By James Barr
Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999
Pp.xvii + 715. $48.00.
Reviewer: Alice Ogden Bellis
Howard University School of Divinity
w
Washington,DC 20017
alter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament and
James Barr’s The Concepr of Biblical Theology are fasci-
nating, complex, and fundamentally different approaches
to biblical theology. Brueggemann has written an Old Testament
theology, while James Barr has discussed what an Old Testament
theology should look like. Brueggemann’s perspective is
postmodern; Barr’s is more difficult to categorize with a single
word, but it is decidedly not postmodern. In spite of major differ-
ences in both approach and perspective, these two pre-eminent bib-
lical theologians reflect amazingly similar views, at least on a
functional level, of what may broadly be called inclusivity. Both are
concerned to be open to Jewish readers, and both succeed in being
more sensitivein that area than many previous Christian Old Testa-
ment theologians. Brueggemann is much more sympathetic than
Barr with the concerns of women and racial minorities; however, in
practice, both Brueggemann and Barr contribute very little to con-
ceiving biblical theology in a manner that takes the issues raised by
women and ethnic minorities seriously. Finally, on the matter of hu-
man sexuality, Brueggemann deals briefly with homosexuality,
while Barr’s only mention of this issue is his complaint that
Brueggemann’s book has no subject index, thus making it hard to
find a topic like homosexuality.
Before focusingon matters of inclusivity, a brief description and
evaluationof the two books in their entirety is in order. As the subti-
tle to Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament suggests, the
Hebrew Scriptures are viewed as testimony in a lawsuit about God.
After two retrospective chapters tracing biblical theology from the
Protestant Reformation to the present, Brueggemann begins his
own work of Old Testament theology with what he calls “Israel’s
Core Testimony,”focusing on the verbs, nouns, and adjectives used
in biblical authors’ testimony about God. The second part of the
book deals with “Israel’s Countertestimony,”in which the core tes-
timony is cross-examined.God’s attributes,as presented in the core
testimony, are here challenged by those who experience God’s
hiddenness, ambiguity, and even negativity. Part 111 is called “Is-
rael’s Unsolicited Testimony.” In this section, Brueggemann con-
siders God’s partners: individualhumans. nations, and creation as a
whole. Part IV, “Israel’s Embodied Testimony,” strains the lawsuit
framework, as Brueggemannhimself concedes. Here the mediation
Religious Studies Review / 233
of God’s presence through the Torah, kings, prophets, worship, and
wisdom is considered. In the final section of the book,
Brueggemann reflects on “Prospects for Theological Interpreta-
tion.”
The testimony framework is useful. It provides aconvenientlens
through which the various theological data of the Old Testament
may be viewed. It also places important emphasis on the nature of
the material as rhetorical utterances, an emphasis that has often
been lacking in previous efforts. Such efforts have been more inter-
ested in content than form and have often been suspicious of aes-
thetics. As a faculty member in a historically black theological
school where a powerful rhetorical tradition shapes preaching in
ways that I often find moving, I am appreciative of Brueggemann’s
focus on rhetoric.
At the same time, Brueggemann may be faulted for emphasizing
the “utteredness” of the text at the expense of ontology. For exam-
ple, he declaresemphatically, “Ishall insist, as consistentlyas I can,
that the God of Old Testament theology as such lives in, with, and
under the rhetorical enterprise of this text, and nowhere else and in
no other way” (66, italics his). Toward the end of the book, this
statement is reiterated even more emphatically with an acknowl-
edgment of how extreme the position is. “Yahweh lives in, with, and
under this speech, and in the end depends [emphasis mine] on Is-
rael’s testimony for an access point in the world. This is, of course, a
sweeping statement, one that I shall perhaps regret before I am fin-
ished” (714).
Brueggemann seems to have missed one of the most obvious
themes in the Hebrew Bible; the text itself points to a God whose
power is not dependent on any human utterance or other human
form of power. Brueggemannhimself suggests that “at some impor-
tant level, faith consists in a willingness to live in the world of this
utterance, and to accept as reliable [emphasis mine] its speech as
testimony” (722). Similarly he avers that “adherents to Yahweh, in
the Old Testament, are those who accept this characteristic testi-
mony as a valid articulation of reality [emphasis mine], on which
they are prepared to act” (722). At the least, tension exists between
these last two statements and the earlier ones that suggest God lives
only in the text.
Just as Brueggemann is uncomfortable with ontology, he is
equally dismissive of the importance of history. He writes, ‘“the
world behind the text’ is not available.... Moreover, were that world
behind the text available, it would not be in any direct way genera-
tive for theological interpretation” (57). Reacting to the “suffocat-
ing hegemony” of “the pursuit of ‘the world behind the text’ in his-
torical criticism’’(57), Brueggemann rejects both the possibility of
knowing anything about this world and the usefulness of such
knowledge for theological interpretation. This is an overreactionto
an admittedly real problem. It is true that the search for the world be-
hind the text has sometimes been so all-consuming that those inter-
ested in theological interpretation have at times become lost in the
maze. It is also true that discoveringwhat happened in ancient Israel
is fraught with difficulty because of the nature of the sources. An-
cient peoples, and not just ancient Hebrews, had a different under-
standing of history than modems do. For them the overriding con-
cern was to convey moral, philosophical, and religious truth, not
simply to describe what happened. Indeed, all history includes ele-
ments of interpretation. This reality does not mean, however, that
the goal of knowing what happened is erroneous in itself. Without
some historical knowledge of the ancient world in which the text
arose, we cannot connect with the text in any meaningfulway. Thus,
234 / Religious Studies Review
Brueggemann’s emphasis on the “utteredness”of the text is a help-
ful corrective, but like many helpful correctives, it goes too far.
In addition to rejecting ontology and history as useful for the bib-
lical theological enterprise, two other important categories dis-
missed by Brueggemann should be mentioned. The first is what he
terms “Enlightenment rationality.” It is clear, however, from his
own description that what he discredits is really a caricature of En-
lightenment rationality: The biblical “insistence on the reality of
brokenness flies in the face of the Enlightenment practice of denial.
Enlightenment rationality, in its popular, uncriticizedform [empha-
sis mine], teaches that with enough reason and resources,
brokenness can be avoided” (560).
More important, but not as immediately obvious as the rejection
of “Enlightenment rationality” is Brueggemann’s rejection of the
notion of human sin as the basis of human brokenness. He describes
a dynamic scenario in which humans move from being “created for
obedience, discernment, and trust,” to being “authorized in the Pit
for complaint, petition, and thanksgiving,” to being “raised to new
life for praise and hope” (553).Precisely what he means by “autho-
rized in the Pit” is unclear. In any case Brueggemann denies that
failure to obey, discern, and trust are the reasons humans are autho-
rized for the Pit:
It is of particular importance that in tracing human life into the Pit
and out of the Pit, we observe that this sequence seems parallel to the
creation-sin-redemption pattern of Christian theology-xcept that
it is very different. It is possible to transpose this sequence,which we
have found in Israel’s testimony, into a doctrinal pattern of “cre-
ation-fall-redemption.”But that is not at all what happens in Israel’s
testimony. Israel is not consistent in its judgment about how human
persons end in the Pit. It never occurs to Israel to reduce entry into
the Pit to guilt or anything like “the fall.” Israel’s way of thinking is
much more in medias res, without great explanatorycuriosity (553).
Brueggemann’s discomfort with traditional Christian theology
may be in part a result of his desire to be sensitiveto Jewish readings
of the text, which have usually rejected the Christian
fall-from-grace scheme. Few Jews would be comfortable. however,
with Brueggemann’s total severance of the tie between sin and pun-
ishment, which is at the heart of the biblical deuteronomistic philos-
ophy (admittedly modified by writings such as Job, but never
thrown out entirely).
In The Concept of Biblical Theology James Barr has not at-
tempted to write a biblical theology but rather a treatise on biblical
theological methodology. He begins with a working definition of
biblical theology: that it is done by biblical scholars, is something
heretofore unknown that biblical scholars must uncover, is ecumen-
ical-that is, both Jews and Christians can do it, is somewhat analo-
gous to doctrinal theology, and is historical, dealing with the theol-
ogy/theologies of the biblical period(s). Barr moves to a historical
overview and then sets up a typology of biblical theologies: 1) de-
scriptive collection of religious ideas, 2) synchronic view of Old
Testament faith, 3) theology from the perspective of Christian reve-
lation, 4) diachronic tracing of various theological trajectories, and
5 ) “canonical” biblical theologies. His perspective, however, is that
biblical theology involves a description of the theology of either
parts or the entirety of the Old Testament at various periods or
throughout the whole period of its composition, which, depending
on the part and period-however narrowly or broadly con-
strued-may involve various methodologies.
Barr defines biblical theology in part through the differences and
overlap he sees between biblical theology. primarily a historical en-
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
terprise, and other fields of study such as doctrinal theology, a
constructive task involving some historical components, and the
history of religion, also a historical task, the focus of which is
broader than biblical theology. Based on the attitudes expressed in
biblical texts, Barr is more open to natural theology as an element of
biblical theology than is currently fashionable. He is also more opti-
mistic about the possibility of “objective” biblical theology than
Brueggemann and other postmodemists. In Barr’s view, a faith
commitment leads not so much to a skewed reading of a text as to a
search for an objective description of its contents.
Barr views the task of biblical theology as primarily a historical
descriptiveone that does not give immediate answers to the burning
questions of the day. He prefers a model in which we begin with
contemporary problems and then look to the Bible as one of a num-
ber of factors to be considered in problem solving. Thus Barr differs
from Brueggemann, not only in what he sets out to do-consider
what biblical theology ought to encompass rather than doing bibli-
cal theology-but also in his antipathy to the postmodernist disdain
for objectivity and historical criticism, as well as in his ultimate con-
clusion that the Bible is not a particularly good source for contem-
porary ethical decision-making. Although Brueggemann would
agree that we must look to sources beyond the Bible on these issues,
he gives greater weight to the Bible-interpreted along certain
lines-in this regard than does Barr.
Although a great diversity of scholars has contributed to biblical
theology, those who consider themselves and are considered bibli-
cal theologians have been and continue to be mostly white, hetero-
sexual, Christian males. The circle has been drawn in such a way
that feminist, liberationist, and queer approaches have largely been
excluded. The remainder of this review will be devoted to a consid-
eration of how issues of inclusivity are (or are not) addressed by
Brueggemann and Barr in the volumes under review.
Sensitiviry to Jewish Perspectives
Jon D. Levenson’s 1987 article, “Why Jews are not Interested in
Biblical Theology,” and his 1993 book in which this article is in-
cluded, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criti-
cism, have perhaps done more than anything else to make Christian
biblical scholars in general and biblical theologians in particular
aware of the ways in which they have excluded Jewish perspectives
and participation. The Jewish theological tradition has been much
less sanguine about the possibility of writing a biblical theology of
the Hebrew Scriptures than the Christian tradition has been of writ-
ing an Old Testament theology. The first testament is so rich, com-
plex, and diverse in authorship, social-political-historicalcontext,
and theological perspective that trying to pull all of the themes and
perspectives together into a relatively unified whole has been a vex-
ing problem that no one has fully succeeded in solving. Additional
concerns flow from the way Christians have related the two testa-
ments, often disparaging the descendants of those who created the
Hebrew Scriptures in the first place. In the last ten years Christian
biblical theologians have become much more sensitive to Jewish
concerns than ever before. Brueggemann and Barr have made posi-
tive contributions in this area.
Brueggemann’s distancing himself from the traditional Chris-
tian fall-from-gracereading of the story of the Garden of Eden may
in part be an attempt to respond to this need. He has also demon-
Volume27 Number3/July 2001 Rerigious Studies Review / 235

strated his openness to the Jewish community in his emphasis on the nized when asked by Religious Studies News (1995) to choose and
particularity and Jewishness of the Old Testament, while at the comment on what I viewed as the most important recent book in
same time claiming4 believe correctly-that the Hebrew Scrip- biblical theology; I selected The Hebrew Bible, The Old Testament,
tures may be validly interpreted by Gentiles as well as by Jews. and Historical Criticism. It may be said that both Barr and
Brueggemann includes Levenson, along with Brevard Childs, Rolf Brueggemann have taken to heart the criticisms leveled against the
Rendtorff, and James Barn, in his list of “centrist” biblical theolo- tradition of Christian biblical theology by Jewish biblical scholars
gians, by which he seems to mean mainstream rather than theologi- and have made a real effort to respond to their challenge.
cally centrist. That this inclusion can be viewed as a kind of token-
ism, however, may be suggested by his use of the vocalized Sensitivity to Feminist Perspectives
tetragrammaton (Yahweh), an anathema to many traditional Jews, The same cannot, unfortunately, be said of Brueggemann’s and
which could easily have been avoided by using the traditional Barr’s responses to feminist biblical scholarship. It must be noted
Christian translation of “Lord” or even the more generic “God.” that this challenge is of a different sort from that of Jewish biblical
Similarly, in his discussion of the levitical purity codes,
scholars, even though there is some overlap between the groups.
Brueggemann suggests in a rather condescendingfashion that those Whereas Jews often question the very possibility of biblical theol-
who are concerned about the sinfulness of homosexuality may be ogy under any name and are offended by the Christian tendency to-
pastorally understood as operating on the basis of these Old Testa-
ward supersessionism, women who consider themselves feminists
ment codes, which have been superseded by the New Testament un- (mostly Euro-Americans, although the term is also used of anyone
derstandingofjustice: “thejustice trajectory has decisively and irre- with sensitivity to women’s concerns), womanists (African Ameri-
versibly defeated the purity trajectory” (196). Although cans), and mujeristas (Hispanickatina women) are concerned with
Brueggemann does not use the word “superseded,” which he finds
what used to be called something like “the doctrine of man” or “an-
offensive, that is the thrust of his argument at this point. Not only thropology” and might now be termed somewhat more generically
does he not consider the purity codes sympathetically in their histor- “the concept of humanity.” The issue is not whether humans are
ical context; he also draws a New Testament conclusion with which
conceptualized holistically or dualistically (body/soul), but how
many New Testament scholars and theologians disagree.
men and women are understood in terms of gender. Are they the
James Barr also makes a solid attempt to listen to Jewish per-
same or different or some of both and in what ways? This question
spectives. In addition to a chapter devoted to “Judaism after Biblical
involves both the way men and women in the Bible are portrayed
Times,” which suggests the usefulness of postbiblical Jewish texts
and the masculine and feminine images used of the deity, as well as
for an understanding of the theology of the Hebrew Scriptures, Barr
the related question of whether God was understood to have a con-
includes an additional chapter on the question, can there be a “Jew-
sort.
ish Biblical Theology?” Here he begins with a discussion of the Brueggemann does include a chapter called “The Human Person
Christian nature of the very term “biblical theology” and moves to a
as Yahweh’s Partner.” Here he focuses on relational, dynamic con-
consideration of a number of Jewish biblical scholars whose work cepts of personhood and rejects all “essentialist” notions, while ac-
fits into this category, even if the term “biblical theology” is unac- knowledging that they have dominated much theological discus-
ceptable to some of them. His conclusion is that if we mean by bibli-
sion. He claims that “the notion of humanity in ‘the image of God’
cal theology “a comprehensive description of implied intellectual
plays no primary role in Old Testament articulations of humanity”
concepts, taken within the terms and boundaries of the Hebrew Bi-
(452, emphasis his). Whether or not this is true, it is clear that the
ble and seen as far as possible within its own self-understandings”
Hebrew Scriptures have much to say about human gender that has
(289), then there is no reason that it cannot be equally a Jewish and
had a deleteriouseffect on women. In effect, Brueggemann makes a
Christian enterprise. He thoroughly rejects the notion that one must
decision that, at least for theological purposes, humans are radically
be a Christian, or even a person of faith, to engage in the academic
equal, and he chooses not to deal with any biblical evidence to the
discipline of biblical theology. In addition, Barr suggests that Chris-
contrary or any biblical ammunition that might be marshaled
tian biblical theologians need to keep in mind the question of how
against the negative material. Unfortunately, many people have no-
Jewish colleagues will respond to their work. This will help keep
ticed the biblical texts that are negative toward women and have not
them from being insular in their perspectives.
heard about the “countertestimony” that many female biblical
Responding in part to Jon Levenson’s publications, especially
scholars have labored to point out. By lifting up this material,
The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament and Historical Criticism, in Brueggemann could have contributed to the liberation of women,
recent years Jewish biblical scholars have been exploring what
which he, in other parts of his book, advocates. Judging from his in-
Christians have traditionally called biblical theology. These devel-
dex, he relegates all but a handful of feminist Hebrew Bible scholars
opments are relatively recent, much more so than feminist, to notes. Only Phyllis Trible receives any significantconsideration,
womanist, and liberationist theological approaches to the Hebrew
and even the substance of her contributions is largely ignored.
Scriptures. Yet both Brueggemann and Barr give fairly serious con- Brueggemann’s interest in gender issues is most pronounced in
sideration to the implications of Jewish participation in the disci- his discussion of feminine imagery for God. He “poses the question
pline. As mentioned above, Brueggemann even includes Jon of whether those habitually excluded from the long-established pa-
Levenson in his group of “centrist” biblical theologians, in spite of triarchal enterprise are entitled to ‘reparations’-that is, some in-
the fact that unlike the other members of the inner circle (with the tentionally granted advantage in the current process of interpreting
possible exception of Barr, whose latest book, though rich and im- the patriarchal tradition” (265). Brueggemann is open to this idea
portant, is not a biblical theology), Levenson has not written, is not and suggests that reparations might mean “both a disproportionate
in the process of writing, and has not to my knowledge declared his honoring of noun-metaphors that critique patriarchal claims, and an
intention of writing a full biblical theology. Nevertheless, acute, self-critical recognition that patriarchal images traditionally
Levenson’s work has been an important stimulus, as I myself recog- exercise a disproportionateinfluence in text and in traditional inter-
236 / Religious Studies RevJ, Volume 237 Number 3 / July 2001

pretations” (266). The word reparations was used after World War I Brueggemannalso overlookswomen characters in the more his-
for the damagesthat the losers had to pay to the winners. But “repa- torical books. When he focuses on personal encounters between
rations” rankles my sensibilitiesbecause it seems to suggestvictim- God and humans, he highlights Abraham, Moses, and Elijah, but
ization and powerlessnesson the part of those who will receive rep- Hagar, who is the first human to whom God appears after the expul-
arations (contemporary women are not powerless). It is a concept sion from the Garden of Eden and the only human ever to name
held in suspicion by some marginated people because those who God,is not mentioned at all (570-71). Examples could be multi-
promise reparations do not always deliver. plied. In Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament, women
Related to gender-based images of God is the sexual conceptual- are even more invisible than they are in the Bible!
ization of God. Barr is particularly interested in this issue. Speaking Since Barr’s Concepr of Biblical Theology is not a biblical theol-
of the inscriptionalevidence that YHWH was once believed to have ogy but a discussion of definitionsand methodology, his attitude to-
a consort, he writes: ward feminist biblical criticism in general is not clear, nor is it obvi-
there may well have been a very considerablereorientation of the re- ous how he would handle women’s stories in the Bible. Since most
ligion in which this bipartite relation within deity was attacked and of the work on women’s stones has been done by women, indirect
eliminated. Such a process would fit within the numerous biblical evidence includes the fact that out of an author’s index of seven
reports of idolatrous and polytheistic tendencies in Israel, although pages, only five women are mentioned and none of them receive
this particular form, i.e. that of a male and female deity together, is any substantial treatment in the volume.
hardly explicit anywhere in the Bible. But it could be that a struggle In a discussion of Childs’s attitude toward feminism, Barr ac-
against sexuality of this kind within deity was the core of the estab-
lishment of monotheism,in other words, at some important stage, it knowledges his own reputation as not being very sympathetic to
was thought more important and more immediateto have no female feminist thinking in general or inclusive language in particular
goddessthan it was to have one single deity. If so, this strugglecould (410). He rebukes Childs for making antifeminist remarks that Barr
well have been one of the most important stages in the development views as so absurd that they have the effect of making (even) him
of what became the biblical tradition. Some forms of biblical theol- more favorable to feminist views. Criticizing Childs for the wish
ogy, however, ignore these possibilities totally and on principle: in “that God would raise up in the new generation of the church’s
part because they are not expressly described in the biblical texts, scholars a Ms Calvin or a Martha Luther!” Barr then reflects, “Un-
and in part simply because they are classed as belonging to history of fortunately, it seems that this is what God has already done” (410).
religion. In my submission, such phenomena are central to any task Pouring further contempt on Childs, he declares, “Barth, by con-
of Old Testament theology, and are far more important than are the
adjustmentsmade by the canonizersin the final stages of the literary trast, might have been much more easy-going about feminism, in
development (138). spite of the absurd hatred that some feministshave thought it right to
pour upon him” (410). In contrast to Barr’s usual careful documen-
Interestingly, although he acknowledges Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s tation of his assertions, he does not feel the need to document this
role in setting up an important conference on the possibility of Jew- accusation. Similarly, in a discussion of the improper use of word
ish biblical theology, he ignores her important monograph on this studies, he asserts in an endnote, again without any documentation,
subject (1992). that “if there is any area where these practices can be said to have re-
Although Brueggemann advocates reparations for the exclusion vived, it is, regrettably, in feminist interpretation” (659, n.34). All
of women’s voices from the biblical theology conversation, he of this circumstantial evidence suggests that Barr’s reputation as
overlooks women’s stories in the Hebrew Bible, which are far more unsympathetic to feminist biblical scholarship is not unwarranted.
numerous than feminine images of God.He mines the Hebrew Barr criticizes Childs for his view that the God of the Hebrew Bi-
Scriptures, utilizing every book except Ruth and the shortest book ble is without sex. Barr argues that the Old Testament-“with some
of the Bible, Obadiah. Brueggemann’s only mention of Esther is qualificationsin some few segments” (411)-presents God as male.
mentioned in one of his severaldiscussions of PhyllisTrible. He ob- He further states that in later tradition God’s maleness was demy-
serves: thologized and that this development was an important one, but he
The outcome of Trible’swork, as with the work of some other femi- maintains that Childs is wrong to make the later, demythologized
nist readers, is to make available to us a troubled world of faith view standard for the Bible as a whole. Perhaps, but given his ca-
where Israel had to live. The world such study exhibits is one in
which the God of Israel is frequently drawn into an alliance with nonical methodology,Childs is interested in an integrated perspec-
male abusers. But it is also a world in which an angel of God is dis- tive of the text of the completed canon, not in the views held by its
patched to care for Hagar, and in which Esther is offeredto Israel as a authors over time. Since God is occasionally presented in feminine
model for how faith is to be portrayed at risk (99). terms, it is difficult to argue without significant qualification that
Of course there is much more to the book of Esther than this, as there the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is unequivocally male. Barr’s
is much more to Trible’s work than these insights. What is espe- negative feelings about feminism seem here to distract him from an
cially surprising about the absence of Ruth and the virtual absence unbiased reading of Childs, a reading that wouldjudge Childs based
of Esther is that these books would provide good illustrations of on how well he executes his own (Childs’s) methodological ap-
some of the points that Brueggemann makes. For example, in his proach, rather than expecting him to adopt Barr’s methodology.
section on “Countertestimony,”he considers “ContradictionsCon- A comparison of Brueggemann and Barr reveals that
cerning Exclusionary Rules,” such as the ones in Deuteronomy 23 Brueggemann is more affirmative of feminist biblical scholarship
against inclusion of foreigners within the Hebrew community. Al- than is Barr. Although Brueggemannis far more positive in attitude,
though he cites Isa 56:3-8, which insists that foreigners should be this does not translate into much more than a rhetorical advocacy of
included, he could have strengthened his case further by a discus- reparations. Brueggemann’s index of names suggests a greater fa-
sion of the book of Ruth, whose protagonist is a Moabite woman miliarity with the literature of feminist biblical scholarship than
from whom no less a Hebrew than King David himself is de- Barr has, but neither Brueggemann nor Barr seems to have delved
scended, according to the genealogy at the end of the book.
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001 Religious Studies Review / 237

into this material at any great depth, judging from the books under portant representative and presents a summary of his work that is
consideration. much clearer and less ambiguous than his coverage of Pixley. In the
same footnote in which he provides the bibliographic information
Perspectives on Liberation Theology about Mosala, he also mentions a volume edited by Afri-
can-American New Testament scholar Cain Hope Felder (1991).
Like feminist biblical scholarship, liberation theology is ac- Ironically, in that volume are chapters contributed by Afri-
knowledged by both Brueggemann and Barr. Barr mentions libera- can-American Old Testament scholars Charles Copher and Randall
tion theology six times in his 600-plus-page text, each time as an el- Bailey, who do attend in a sustained way to textual interpretation.
ement in the thought of a scholar whom he is considering. It is more Copher identifies biblical characters with aspects of African heri-
difficult to gauge his evaluation of it than to glean his attitude to- tage. Bailey analyzes biblical texts that refer to Africans, revealing
ward feminist biblical scholarship. Nevertheless, the perspective is the highly affirmative attitude of the ancient Hebrews to Africa and
implicitly negative. In particular, in presenting the work of Rainer Africans. Admittedly, Copher’s and Bailey’s work is not explicitly
Albertz, Barr observes: “The sociological emphasis is there, and liberation theology, but that does not mean it is not important to lib-
with it the ethos stemming from liberation theology. There really eration theology or the work of biblical theology.
was [emphasis mine] a ‘liberated major group’ stemming from the In spite of the fact that the further south one goes in Africa, the
Exodus” (120). Barr continues by quoting Albertz: “‘The Yahweh less archaeological work has been done, a number of clues in the
religion of Israel originates in the liberation process of an oppressed Hebrew Scriptures suggest a far more significant African contribu-
outsider-groupin Egyptian society, and their religious symbolism is tion to the first testament than is generally believed, From Egyptian
therefore directly related to the process of historical political libera- names like Moses to parallels between the Garden of Eden story and
tion”’ (120). After a couple of sentences dealing with what Barr sub-Saharan African creation stories, the Hebrew Scriptures are
considers to be Albertz’s uncritical acceptance of Jewish positions filled with African clues to the biblical sources puzzle that most
and criticisms, especially those of Jon Levenson, Barr then sug- Euro-American biblical scholars have tried to solve looking only to
gests: Mesopotamia. While both Brueggemann and Barr emphasize the
There is a distinct similarity to the picture, drawn by Gottwald and Jewishness of the text, neither is interested in its Africanness. Since
others, of an early Israel that was an egalitarian society, while the Barr is usually attentive to theological elements that are only hinted
Canaanites, who in older days used to be guilty of orgies and reli- at in the biblical text but are found in extrabiblical sources, such as
gious abominations, here tend to become monarchical organizers
and oppressors, if not capitalistic exploiters (120, emphasis mine).
inscriptions that portray YHWH with a consort, one might expect
that he would be interested in the ways in which African contribu-
The suggestion that Albertz anachronistically views the tions have influenced the theology of the Hebrew Scriptures. One
Canaanites as virtually capitalist exploiters is apparently intended example is the possibility that the Egyptian Isis-Osiris mythology
to ridicule his position. Barr’s critiques of Childs’s and may lie behind the strange story of God trying to kill Moses,
Mildenberger’s incorporation of liberation theological elements Zipporah’s solving the problem by circumcising their son, and her
into their work is similar. His apparently derisive attitude toward apparently vicarious circumcision of Moses (Exod 4:24-26; Pardes
liberation theology is never explicit but is often implied. 1992). Another is the argument in favor of a Cushite origin for the
With respect to Central American and black liberation theology, worship of YHWH (Rice 1995).
Brueggemann includes the Nicaraguan Jorge Pixley and the South As in the case of feminist biblical scholarship, Brueggemann’s
African Mosala Itumelung (along with Phyllis Trible) as examples evaluation of liberation theology is more affirmativethan Barr’s, al-
of “Efforts at the Margin.” He questions the validity of Pixley’s though his actual engagement with it is very limited. Barr never
reading, based on critiques by Jon Levenson (which he describes in mentions a liberation theologian, or Central American or Afri-
a way that leaves the reader in some confusion about Levenson’s CadAfrican-American biblical scholar by name except to report
concerns about Pixley) and by Terence Fretheim (which he does not Brueggemann’s inclusion of Pixley and Mosala in his list of mar-
summarize at all). Brueggemann then poses the question of norms, ginal biblical theologians. In addition to Brueggemann’s brief treat-
suggesting that ments of Pixley and Itumelung, womanist biblical scholar Renita
such a centrist consensus itselfis now exceedinglyproblematic.As a Weems makes it into his endnotes three times. Neither Barr nor
result, Old Testament theology must recognize that other readings Brueggemann considers African presence in the Hebrew Scriptures
outside the centrist consensus must be acknowledged as operative or possible African contributions to Hebrew religion. Perhaps these
and must be taken seriously.It is evidentin the work of Pixley, ...that issues will make it onto the radar screens of the next generation of
such marginated readings can see dimensionsof the text that estab- biblical theologians.
lished readings of a historical-criticalor theological-dogmatickind
have missed.Indeed, a reading like Pixley’s is crucial if we are to at- Perspectives on Sexual Minorities
tend to the polyphonic character of the text (101).
The reader may be surprised to hear that a centrist consensus exists One final issue of inclusivity should be raised sexual minorities
and will wonder what it is when the centrists are identified by in general and homosexuals in particular. Oddly enough, neither
Brueggemann as scholars as diverse in viewpoint as Barr, Childs, Barr nor Brueggemann deals with sexual mores other than homo-
Levenson, and Rendtorff. The reader is also left not knowing pre- sexuality. Queer biblical theology is not acknowledged. Barr men-
cisely what dimensions of the text lifted up by “non-centrists” like tions homosexuality only once when criticizing Brueggemann for
Pixley are considered important by Brueggemann. his lack of an index to help readers find his discussion of various
Brueggemann then turns to black liberation theology, about topics, one of the examples being homosexuality. As mentioned
which he states that “it is difficult to identify black African or Afri- above\in the discussion of Brueggemann’s sensitivity to Jewish
can-Americanreaders who attend in a sustained way to actual inter- readers, he deals with gay sexuality as part of his treatment of the
pretive work“ (101). He then chooses Itumelung Mosala as an im- levitical purity code, accepting homosexuality and rejecting the pu-
 Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001

rity legislation. Since the purity code is an important part of the He- References
brew Bible that Christians often ignore, and sexuality is an impor-
tant element of God’s creation, and matters of sexuality are BAILEY,RANDALL C.
involved in some of the depictions of God‘s relationship to human- 1991 “Beyond Identification:The Use of Africans in Biblical
ity, it is somewhat surprising that these issues are not more promi- Poetry and Narrative.” In Cain Hope Felder (ed.), Stony
nent concerns. the Road We Trod: African-American Biblical Interpreta-
tion, 165-86. Fortress.
Concluding Reflections
BELLIS,ALICE-DEN
Neither Brueggemann (except on a rhetorical level) nor Barr takes 1995 Review of Levenson 1993. Religious Studies News 103,
seriouslyfeminist, liberation,African-American,and queer biblical 14.
scholarship. Brueggemann makes a positive effort, and for this he CHILDS,BREVARDS.
should be sincerely thanked. It is a step in the right direction,even if 1992 Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theo-
only a very tentative step. Each generation, my own included, logical Reflection on the Christian Bible. Fortress.
stands on the shoulders of the previous one. Brueggemann should
not have suggested, however, that the emergence of new voices in- COPHER, CHARLES
dicates “that hegemonic interpretation that was once taken for 1991 “The Black Presence in the Old Testament.” In Cain
granted can no longer be assumed or sustained” (98). This assumes Hope Felder (ed.), Stony the Road We Trod: Afri-
can-American Biblical Interpretation, 146-64. Fortress.
that those on the margins today will never become part of the hege-
rnonic club. In reality, graduate training and participationin the aca- FRYMER-KENSKY,TIKVA
demic guild gradually shape the participants into a particular mold 1992 In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the
just as new participants slowly reshape the mold. A diversity of Transformationof Pagan Myth Free Press.
voices has always vied for dominance, even when all those voices
were of white Christian males. The nature of diversity has changed, LEVENSON, JON D.
1987 “Why Jews Are Not Interested in Biblical Theology.” In
but the dynamics are not as different as they superficially appear. Jacob Neusner, B. A. Levine, and E. S. Frerichs (eds.),
Having voiced concerns about the way Brueggemann and Barr Judaic Perspectives on Ancient Israel. Fortress.
have dealt with issues of inclusivity in their volumes on Old Testa- 1993 The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical
ment theology, I want to reemphasize the invaluable service that Criticism:Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies. West-
both have rendered to the academic profession as well as the reli- minster John Knox.
gious community. Both have a wonderful grasp of a large body of
biblical theological literature. Both have wrestled with the issues PARDES.ILANA
facing the discipline, and both have helped all who are interested in 1992 Countertraditionsin the Bible: A Feminist Approach.
biblical theology to understand the crossroads at which we stand at Harvard University Press.
the turn of the millennium more clearly than we did before. No one RICE, GENE
working in this field can ignorethese two volumes. They are signifi- 1995 “Africans and the Origins of the Worship of Yahweh.”
cant mileposts on the continuingjourney. Journal of Religious Thought 50:27-44.
Volume 27 Numher 3 / July 2001 ReUgious Studies Review / 239

interest in the applied aspects of Yoga can be seen in the care she has
FOUR RECENT BOOKS ON YOGA taken to make her translation clear and accessible.
Many translations of the Yogu SEtru provide a loose paraphrase
YOGA: DISCIPLINE OF FREEDOM. THE YOGA SUTRA of the text, often embellished with the translator’s favorite exam-
ATTRIBUTED TO PATANJALI ples and similes. Two examples of this genre are the Theosophical
Translated by Barbara Stoler Miller Society translation by Taimini (1961) and the recent Heart of Yoga
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996; New York: translation by Desikachar (1995). More scholarly translations in-
Bantam Doubleday, 1998 clude traditionalcommentaries, such as Woods’s great 1914classic
Pp. xiv + 114. Cloth, $18.95; paper, $1 1.95. that includesthe Bh-syu of Vyasa and the gloss of Vacasoati h4iSra
T. S. Rukmani’s trakation (1981ff.) inciudes the co&entary of
THE ESSENCE OF YOGA: REFLECTIONS ON THE Vijiiinabhiksu, and Legget’s translation (1990) includes a com-
YOGA SOTRAS OF PATANJALI mentary attributed (probably incorrectly) to saizkara. Both of these
By Bernard Bouanchaud; Translated by Rosemary Desneux genres produce volumes of several hundred pages to explain 195
Portland, OR: Rudra Press, 1997 verses that can easily fit into twelve pages of translated text.
Pp. xxx + 275. Paper, $14.95. Yoga: Discipline of Freedom embodies a third style of transla-
THE YOGA TRADITION: ITS HISTORY, LITERATURE, tion, one that seeks to emulate Pataiijali’soriginal work. Rather than
PHILOSOPHY, AND PRACTICE presenting her own interpretation by telling her own stories, and
By Georg Feuerstein rather than laboriously presenting a word-by-word rendering of a
Prescott, AZ:Hohm Press, 1998 traditional commentary, Miller chooses for the most part to let the
Pp.xxxii + 686. N.p. siirras stand alone, gently grouping them according to obvious
themes and providing a concise commentary to help the reader
THE INTEGRITY OF THE YOGA DARSANA: A make the transition from one segment to the next, in the style of
RECONSIDERATION OF CLASSICAL YOGA translations by Feuerstein (1979) and Chapple and Kelly (1990).
By Ian Whicher The result is an elegant, clean rendering of the Yoga Siitra that is ac-
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998 cessible and meaningful to readers at all levels.
Pp. xii + 426. Cloth, $81.50; paper, $27.95. In several instances, Miller makes translation choices that nicely
convey the sense of the original Sanskrit. She translates Sam-putti
as contemplativepoise, which, like the original, conveys a sense of
Reviewer: Christopher Key Chapple intention and composure. She translates citta-vytti as turnings of
Loyola Marymount University thought, sattva as lucidity, and vitarka as conjecture. With some of
Los Angeles, CA 90045 the more difficult passages, particularly in the third section, she

A s I bicycle to and from my university campus, I often pass a forms her translations with extraordinary gracefulness: “Through
parked car with a bumper sticker that reads “I’d rather be in direct perception of the cognitiveprocess, one has knowledge of the
Sam-dhi.” Sam-dhi, a Sanskrit term, refers to the culmina- thoughts of others. But this does not involve knowledge of the un-
tion of Yoga practice, a moment of conversion, completion, and derlying object of thought since that is not one’s object of percep-
contemplation. Almost everywhere I turn, the presence of the Yoga tion” (IIk19-21).
tradition can be found, from our dance department to health clubs In other instances, her decisions on individual words are less ob-
and to the numerous Yoga centers throughout Southern California, vious. For example, she translates kvara as Lord of Yoga, which is
including the famous Lake Shrine of the Self Realization Fellow- more of an interpolation from the commentary than derived from
ship, establishedby Paramharnsa Yogananda five decades ago. One the original term, which does not specify kvara’s domain. Pratyuya
studio, Yoga Works in Santa Monica, provides Yoga instruction to in the original carries a more nuanced sense than the term “con-
over‘four thousand people each week, certainly rivaling the best at- cept.” In a few instances, she adds many additional words to her
translation, such as in her rendering of I: 19. The original contains
tended of churches, synagogues,and mosques. Although most peo-
ple participate in Yoga classes for the physical benefits, many also five words: bhuvu-pratyayo videhu-prakyti-layiiniim.A possible
become intrigued by the philosophical and religious aspects of literal translation might be: “The ones who are absorbed in primal
Yoga practice. materialityand bodiless have an intention of becoming.” The Miller
This upsurge of idterest in the practice of Yoga has seen an ac- translation seeks to specify and explain as follows: “For gods and
men unencumbered by physical bodies, but still enmeshed in mate-
companying rise of publications and scholarly reflections on the
rial nature, the cessation of thought is limited by reliance on the phe-
Yoga tradition. Numerous translations of Pataiijali’s Yoga Siitra
nomenal world.”
can be found in bookshops and libraries, along with various inter-
Miller succinctly explains the Samkhya system that undergirds
pretive works. This review will focus on recently published work:
two translations and two thematic studies of Yoga. the Yoga Siitra. She also elucidates Pataiijali’scritique of YogScSra
Buddhism,which hinges on the argument that, in Yoga, things exist
Barbara StolerMiller taught at Barnard College in New York un-
separately from our perception of them. On the whole, this work
til her death in 1993. In the posthumously published Yoga: Disci-
presents an important and useful tendering of the Yogu Siitra. It in-
pline of Freedom, she writes, “My own interest in Pataiijali’s text
cludes a Sanskrit-to-English and English-to-Sanskrit glossary of
dates back more than twenty-five years, to when I read it as one of
key words, as well as useful annotations. Beautifully printed and
the foundationtexts of Indian philosophy. As a philosophy student I
affordably priced, this book, like a clear jewel, competently con-
was intrigued by the startling ways in which Pataiijali analyzed veys the spirit and meaning of the Yoga tradition.
epistemological problems and by the method of practice he offered
to penetrate them. I have tried to practice yoga ever since” (xii). Her

Bernard Bouanchaud’s Essence of Yoga (1997) similarly pre-
sents a new translation of the YogaSiitra. It begins with athree-page
description of the text’s probable history and an uninterrupted
twelve-page translation of all 195 aphorisms. The author then pro-
ceeds to devote one or more pages to each aphorism,beginningwith
his translation, a series of reflective questions, a summary discus-
sion of primary themes with frequent reference to VyBsa’s com-
mentary, the Sanskrit as pronounced according to the rules of
euphonic combination, the Sanskrit with the words divided, and a
word-by-word translation of Sanskrit terms. The book concludes
with a Sanskrit-to-Englishglossary and index and a brief bibliogra-
phy of seven translations.
This book provides a useful presentation and interpretation of
the text. It is clearly laid out, and the author is well informed regard-
ing the substrate of S e k h y a philosophy that governs Pataiijali’s
arguments. Several passages are admirably translated, particularly
in the second and third sections. For instance, Bouanchaud renders
verse 11:15, one of the longest, as follows: “The discerning person
sees that all is suffering, because of changes due to the passage of
time, to worries and conditioning, and to inappropriate manifesta-
tions of the constituent qualities of nature.” Similarly, when
Pataiijali warns aspiring Yoga practitioners to be wary of charis-
matic leaders in 11151, Bouanchaud responds with the following
translation: “When higher creatures invite you, do not give way to
wonderment on meeting them, but keep a detached viewpoint when
faced with their allure.” Like Miller, he takes to heart the applied as-
pects of this text and seeks to provide an accessibleand sensibleren-
dering.
However, a few areas of translation leave some questions unan-
swered, or perhaps answer questionsthat Pataiijalipurposefullyleft
vague. First, in the famous definition of Yoga, Bouanchaud trans-
lates the term nirodha, which normally means cessation, as “direct
and focus.” Later, he translates the same term as “control” (I: 12),
“passing beyond” (15 l), “ceases” (111:9), and “stoppage” (glos-
sary). Using different translation terms in each instance obfuscates
Pataiijali’s argument. In the first instance, he allows for the notion
that thoughts continue in a state of Yoga; in the final usage, he states
that they must come to an end. Although Pataiijali himself seems to
leave this somewhat open to interpretation (see discussion in
Whicher, below), the author does not indicate the reason for his
multiple translations of the same term.
In the second section, Bouanchaud translates abhiniveja, the
fifth and last of the impurities, as “fear.” Usually interpreted as
clinging to life, this term grammatically indicates a desire to keep
entering the realm of the manifest world. A bit more explanation is
warranted, such as the inclusion of the notion of “fear of death.”
Otherwise, Pataiijali would have used one of the many terms avail-
able to him that mean fear. Also in the second section, Bouanchaud
translates the first phase of eightfold Yoga (yama) as “respect to-
ward others” instead of restraint or discipline and the second phase
(niyama)as self-restraint, whereas this phase entails the active ap-
plication of constructive behaviors, usually translated as obser-
vances. He also seems to dodge the rather explicit insistence on celi-
bacy (for monks) and fidelity (for laypeople),prefemng to translate
brahmacarya as “moderation.”
In general, the commentary provided by the author is quite use-
ful, with appropriate references to VyIisa and the S e k h y a system.
However, a list of questions precedes each section, designed as
points for reflection, but couched too frequently in terms of the first
person pronoun. One small example: “Am I as at ease in great de-
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
bates on ideas as I am in seeing to the small details of daily life?”
(57). One small statement in the author’s commentary seemed at
variance with the ultimate intent of Yoga: “It means total accep-
tance of one’s personality” (161). which seems quite contrary to
Pataiijali’s emphasis on the extirpation of all attachment.
The Sanskrit apparatus at the end of each discussion does not
provide reliable spelling for the terms, nor do the word lists neces-
sarily correspond to what can be found in the translation. Overall,
this is not as useful as some of the other translations of the Yoga
SEtra due to its imprecise approach to key terminology.
Of the many books that have appeared over the years on the
Yoga tradition, two stand out as true classics: Mircea Eliade’s
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1973) and Surendranath
Dasgupta’s Yoga as Philosophy and Religion (1924). In an attempt
to provide a comprehensivesurvey of the Yoga tradition intended to
be accessible to the public and useful to scholars,Georg Feuerstein
has produced The Yoga Tradition: Its History, Literature, Philoso-
phy, and Practice. This handsome and sizable volume stems from
two of Feuerstein’s earlier works, Textbook of Yoga (1975) and
Yoga:The Technologyof Ecstasy (1989). Its much larger size can be
attributed to new work Feuerstein has included on Yoga in Sikhism
and the saints of Maharashtra and to the inclusion of his complete
translations of Pataiijali’s Yoga Siitra, Vasugupta’s Shiva Siitra,
Narada’s Bhakti Siitra, several of the Yoga Upanisads, two short
Buddhist texts, and the Goruksha Paddhati, a Haiha Yoga text.
This remarkable book includes an encyclopedicbird’s-eye view
of the Yoga tradition. Although one can perhaps take issue with
Feuerstein’s insistence on the early date he ascribes to the Vedas
(4OOO-2OOO BCE), his comprehensive survey of Yoga’s presence
throughout Indian history is quite masterful. After explaining his
own involvement with the study and practice of Yoga (with special
reference to what he calls the Crazy Wisdom tradition), he then pro-
vides a thematic introduction to different forms of Yoga (Riija,
Hapa, Jiiiina, Bhakti, Karma, etc.) and explains Yoga’s contribu-
tion to the medical thought of India. Citing major texts of the Hindu
tradition, he traces yogic concepts in the Vedas and the Upanisads.
He explains the role of Yoga in Jainism and Buddhism and exam-
ines the pre-classical Yoga of the Bhagavad GitZ and the
Mahiibhiirata.
The central portion of the book discusses classical Yoga and in-
cludes Feuerstein’s translation of Pataiijali’s Yoga Siitra in its en-
tirety. The last two hundred pages of the book discuss postclassical
Yoga as expressed in Shaivism, Vaishnavism, the Pureas, the
YogavZsighu, the Yoga Upanisads, Sikhism, and Hatha Yoga.
This book provides a rich descriptive tour of the Yoga tradition,
from speculationregarding its origins in the Indus Valley to the late
medieval period. In some instances, it provides exciting informa-
tion, such as the description of the Vratyas (160-64) and the first
English translation of the Goraksha-Paddhati, an important Hafha
Yoga text. As a result of the great breadth of material covered, some
of the philosophical aspects of the tradition beg for further explana-
tion: For instance, Feuerstein describes Se k h y a ’s insistence on in-
dividual souls as “illogical“ (101) without fully consideringthe rea-
sons that ~Svarakrsnaand Pataiijali consider this to be the case.
According to S e k h y a , there are plural souls “because of the diver-
sity of births, deaths and faculties; because of actions or functions
that take place at different times; and because of differences in the
proportions of the three gunas in different entities” (SZmkhya
KZrikZ XVIII, as translated in Larson, 170).Yoga echoes this senti-
ment by stating that when one person achieves realization and
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
brings karmic involvementto an end, the world does not end for ev-
eryoneelse (Yoga Siirra II:22), indicating that the world exists inde-
pendently of our existence of it and, by extension, that each person
holds a unique perspective. The chapter entitled “The Philosophy
and Practice of Pataiijala-Yoga”provides a brief summary of the
major issues but neglects to discuss fully the fivefold nature of af-
flicted k m a , a central theme to understanding yogic practice.
Despite these shortcomings,this book makes an important con-
tribution to the literature on the Yoga tradition. The extensive foot-
notes and bibliography help guide one toward further readings. The
glossary of key terms is quite comprehensive.The index is very de-
tailed, allowingone to trace ideas as they appear in variousphases in
the course of Indian philosophical history. The book itself is very
handsomely designed, with ample illustrations and an easy-to-read
two-column format.
While Feuerstein may have sacrificed depth in some instances
for the sake of breadth, Ian Whicher’s The Integrity of the Yoga Sys-
tem hones in on the arguments of classical Yoga with insight and
precision. Whereas Feuerstein devotes more than five hundred
pages to his discussion of nonclassical forms of Yoga, Whicher
summarizes both pre- and postclassical forms of Yoga in only
thirty-five pages, preferring to focus nearly four hundred pages on
the classical tradition attributed to Pataiijali and commented upon
by VyHsa. Drawing upon both traditional commentaries and the in-
sightful studies of Dasgupta, Koelman. Feuerstein, Rukmani, and
others, Whicher embarks upon a comprehensive analysis of the
Yoga tradition.
The Yoga system must be seen as closely aligned with the
Simkhya philosophy as articulated in fgvaraknna’s SZmkhya
Kirikii. Point by point, Pataiijali summarizes Simkhya in SUtras
11:15-27.In these thirteen statements,Pataiijali discusses the nature
of suffering(duhkha),the agency of the three strandsof manifest re-
ality ( g u y s : saffva, rajas, ramas) and their stated purpose of pro-
viding experience and liberation for the seer, the various stages of
manifestation (gross, subtle, potential, and suspended), and the ne-
cessity of distinguishing between that which is seen @rakyti) and
the seer (purusa).In short, the entire Simkhya system can be found
in the secondpzdu and is echoed in each of the other four sectionsof
the Yoga Siitra (k19, 11152-55; IV:2-5, 13-19, 22-34). Simkhya
places great emphasis on the need to discern the distinction between
the world of potential and real activity (the seen) and the seer.
Hence, the S i w y a and Yoga systems have been referred to as
dualistic. Various scholars have been careful to point out that this
dualism differs from that of Descartes. For instance, Georg
Feuerstein writes “this dichotomy between Self and the world is not
quite the same as the Cartesian dualism” (1979, 13) and Larson
notes that “the Simkhya dualism is not a dualism of mind and body,
or a dualism of thought and extension. All such dualisms are in-
cluded or comprehended on the side of the unconscious world
[prakyti])” (1979, 198). According to Simkhya (and Yoga), all
things exist for the sake of consciousness, yet the ultimate goal lies
in stilling and ultimately distancingoneself from all aspectsof man-
ifest reality. In this style of dualism, the world is regarded as stained
in some way, because the highest value can only be found in the fi-
nal disappearanceof the world (sarva-nirodha).For this reason, the
duahsm presented by Simkhya and Yoga has been traditionally
seen as world-negating, more in tune with Zoroaster or Augustine
than with Confucius or Lao Tzu, who seek harmony and integration
with the way of the world, The abundance of wandering mendicants
(siidhus)in India, coupled with the classic image of the remote Yogi
meditating in a cave, serves to reinforce this notion of Yoga as total
detachment from the things of the world.
Whicher attempts to see Yoga in a new light. Rather than empha-
sizing the world-negating final goal of Yoga, Whicher chooses to
cast his scholarly gaze on those aspects of the Yoga system that up
hold and enrich the yogin’s experience of the world. Siding more
with the Pataiijali’sadage that “the nature of the seen is only for the
purpose of that (seer)” (YS11:21), he looks at the YogaSErra less as a
condemnation of all worldliness than as a celebration of the possi-
bility of purifying one’s relationship with the world through the
practices of Yoga.
Whicher appropriatelybegins with an assessmentof the similari-
ties and differences between SQlllkhyaand Yoga. Both schoolsdis-
cuss the relationship at length between seer (purufa,drafrr) and
seen (prakyri, gunas. dyiya).Whicher, however, suggeststhat Yoga
leaves more room for a “healthy relationship” between the two,
while S i w y a tends more emphatically to call for their separation.
As Whicher states,
Pataiijali leaves much room for understanding “dissolution”or “re-
turn to the source,”with an epistemologicalemphasis thereby allow-
ing the whole system of Yoga duriana to be interpreted along more
open-ended lines. In other words, what actually “dissolves” or is
ended in Yoga is the yogin’s misident$cation with prakti, a mis-
taken identity of self that-contrary to our true identity as
purusa-can be nothing more than a product of the three guFas
under the influence of spiritual ignorance (65).
With this view in mind, he translates the second aphorism of
Pataiijali’s Yoga Siirru as “Yoga is the cessation of [the misidentifi-
cation with] the modifications of the mind” (46). Although one
might see this as an overly optimistic translation of the notion of
cessation, it nonethelessemphasizesthe process of Yoga rather than
its completion, an ambiguity certainly present within the original
text. Throughout the text, Pataiijali intersperses descriptions of
Yoga techniques with descriptions of its final culmination, most
frequently expressed in his concept of discriminative discernment
(viveka-khyiti,11: 26,28; 111: 52,54; IV:26,29). While discernment
is not synonymous with cessation, for Pataiijali the application of
discernment results in the desired goal of escape (h7na) and the
emergence of the light of knowledge (jfiiina-dipti).
In the third chapter, Whicher examines the structures of mind,
emphasizing the progressive path of purification that leads to an
ability to develop a “reflected consciousness” whereby one can
abide in one’s true identity (svariipe ‘vasrhiinam). In chapter four,
he discusses cessation (nirodhu) along similar lines to those sug-
gested by Bouanchaud, stating that rather than abrogation of all ac-
tivity, facility in cessation allows one to transform the mind into a
reflective tool for the sake of the seer. In chapter five. Whicher ex-
amines all the various forms of samiidhi listed by Pataiijali: internal,
external, cognitive, with seed, without seed, and so forth. He states
that “Pataiijali’scentral concern is how to attain a knowing-oneness
that is not merely a mental activity ...but rather involves a tacit rec-
ognition, an uncompromising identity as the ever-free, unmodified
purusa” (204). He observes that the various levels of cognitive
sum-dhi help prepare one for this ultimate state.
Many interpreters of Yoga claim that the final state of liberation
cannot be achieved until the death of the body. Through a careful
examination of Pataiijali’s program of progressive replacement of
negativity with positive virtues, Whicher suggests that Yoga takes a
more optimistic view. Emphasizing that the “attainment of insight
is ‘truthbearing”’ (YSI:48),Whicher states that “Farfrom being de-
nied or renounced, the world, for the yogin. has become trans-
W / Religious Studies Review Volume 27 Number 3 / July a001

STUDIES
NEWWOMEN’S formed, properly engaged” (280).Referring to the idea of “skill in
action” in the Bhugavud GitZ, he suggests that the yogin gains the
power to abide in the unchanging pure consciousness.Further citing
the notion that the cloud of virtue sum-dhi erases all afflicted ac-
tion, he concludes by stating that “Yoga brings about ... a dimen-
sion that ... does not negate self and world but properly bridges or
aligns them” (300). This revisioning of the tradition goes against
the grain of typologizing Yoga as dualistic and instead presents a
credible explanation for the enduring appeal of the philosophy and
practice of Yoga. Whicher makes a sound if controversial attempt
to move Yoga away from its reputation as world-negating into a
more positive characterization as a life-affirming tool for personal
integration.
Each of these books serves to help elucidate the Yoga tradition.
For undergraduate teaching, the most useful of the four would be
Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation. It includes enough information
about the tradition to allow one to read the text without becoming
overwhelmed.For a specialized upper-divisionor graduate class on
the Yoga tradition, Georg Feuerstein’s work would be very useful.
His extensive bibliography points students to material for further
research, and his encyclopedic style gives them a sense of the com-
plexity and richness of Yoga. A seminar on Yoga should definitely
include Whicher’s book. His survey of all the pertinent literature
provides a compelling and insightful interpretation of the Yoga
Sitru that will provoke extensivediscussion. Widely distributed by
Rudra Press to spiritual bookstores and Yoga centers, the
Bouanchaud translation provides a popular introduction to the
study of Yoga but lacks the rigor of the other three books surveyed
in this essay.
As the Yoga tradition continues to gain in popularity among col-
lege students and the general public, these books provide important
insight into the religious and philosophical aspects of this ancient
tradition.
References
SURENDRANATH
DASGUPTA,
1924 Yoga as Philosophy and Religion. London: Trubner.
ELIADE,
MIRCEA
1958,1973 Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Trans.Willard R. Trask.
Bollingen Foundation; Princeton University Press.
GEORG
FEUERSTEIN,
1975 Textbook of Yoga. London: Rider.
1979 The Yoga-Siha of Pataiijali: A New Translation and
Commentary. Kent, England: Dawson.
1989 Yoga: The Technology ofEcstasy. Los Angeles: J. P.
Tarcher.
LARSON, GERALDJAMES
1979 Classical Siimkhya: An Interpretation of Its History and
Meaning. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001
JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN: POLITICAL
THEORIST AND POSTMODERN PROPHET
PUBLIC MAN, PRIVATE WOMAN: WOMEN IN SOCIAL
AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981
Pp. 408. Paper, $30.00.
WOMEN AND WAR
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 1995
Pp. xvi + 302. Paper, $14.95.
POWER TRIPS AND OTHER JOURNEYS: ESSAYS IN
FEMINISM AS CIVIC DISCOURSE
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990
Pp. 192. Paper, $14.95.
DEMOCRACY ON TRIAL
New York: Basic Books, 1995
Pp. 176. Paper, $14.00.
AUGUSTINE AND THE LIMITS OF POLITICS
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995
Pp. xiv + 143. Paper, $16.00.
NEW WINE AND OLD BOTTLES: INTERNATIONAL
POLITICS AND ETHICAL DISCOURSE
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998
Pp. 99. Paper, $14.95.
Reviewer: Frances S.Adeney
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Louisville, KY 40205-1798
Who Is This Woman and What Does She Want?
J
ean Bethke Elshtain’s name sparks conversation among schol-
ars interested in Western political thought and the questions be-
setting both form and content of political theory in the United
States today. Neither aclassic liberal nor a communitarian, neither a
radical feminist nor a conservative, neither an agnostic philosopher
nor a Christian theologian, Elshtain creates new intersticesbetween
positions. Her independence of thought is mirrored in her profes-
sional activities; she has held positions at the University of Massa-
chusetts, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Chicago; and
she publishes books with numerous university presses.
Elshtain’s interest in women in public and private spheres leads
her into lively conversation with men of the classical canon and
women as scholars, innovators, and casualties of social change.
Standing in the philosophical stream of Plato and Augustine, she
keeps alive the tensions between the limited, contextual, and
never-perfectpresent, on the one hand, and, on the other, the hope of
a good end that can only be hinted at but is worth striving to realize.
The situatedness of Elshtain’s essays arises from a methodological
conviction that the epistemic turn focuses and limits knowledge.
Openly impatient with ontological arguments, she treats ideas in the
tradition as aids to current understandings, rather than as universal
claims to defend or refute. She deconstructs contemporary ontolog-
ical arguments, including those that give women special status as
more moral than men and those that make state sovereignty a sacral
principle (New Wine,21). It should not surprise us that as Elshtain’s
Religious Studies Review / %I3
work progresses it becomes more contextual, the narrative focus in-
creases, celebration of diversity develops, and the strands of her
Christian theology and her public philosophy intertwine. Elshtain
becomes a model of a constructive postmodern thinker.
Three themes stand out in Elshtain’s work, each incorporating a
tension. First, the traditional exclusion of women from the public
realm stands in tension with the conviction that the distinction be-
tween public and private should be maintained in an egalim’an
manner. Second, the insistence on an imperfect present struggles
dialectically in Elshtain’s thought with a vision of a good end, a
common good that can be clearly delineated. A third theme that
builds on the first two focuses on both the loss of civil society and
the continuing conviction that individuals and groups can work to-
gether for the common good, reshaping identities to fulfill that goal.
Elshtain’s assessment of the current situation for democracy
brings these themes together. Along with Robert N. Bellah, she la-
ments the loss of civil society-those mediating institutions that
both connect us to and protect us from the state (Democracy On
Trial, 3.’Decrying the conflation of public and private, which she
attributes partly to “the historic animus of philosophers and revolu-
tionaries to ordinary human lives and ties and meaning” (Power
Trips, 47), she maintains the value of delineating a private sphere.
Concern for justice in the family leads her to sympathize with tradi-
tionalists like Eleanor Roosevelt, whose social feminism stressed
empowering ordinary women in their families and communities
(Power Trips, 40). At the same time, Elshtain displays a faith that
individuals and groups share both the desire and the capacity to
work as citizens for the common good (Augustine and the Limits of
Politics). Rather than exempting women from that responsibility,
Elshtain positions women as social actors in the world (Democracy
On Trial, 128).
Public Man. Private Woman
Elshtain began work on this theme with Public Man, Private
Woman (1981). Using the public/private distinction as a lens, she
analyzes views of women in Western political thought. While criti-
cizing the male-centered focus of philosophers from Aristotle to
Hegel, Elshtain nevertheless finds much of the tradition useful. The
result is a refreshingly nuanced assessment of public and private
spheres, civil society, state, and family as each of those relates to
changing views of women in society.
Describing Western views of public and private in the thought of
particular theorists, she shows how those views aligned women
with family affairs while giving men public accountability and
power. Tracing major changes in political thought and the structur-
ing of power, she highlights figures from Plato through Marx; how-
ever, rather than the typical move of showing how her own position
becomes the capstone, bringing together or moving beyond all of
the others, she takes a different tack. Arriving at “neither definitive
answers nor conclusive definitions” about the public and private,
she claims rather to have “nurtured a complexity which is possible
only as one gets inside alternative images of reality” (197). She then
uses that complexity to interpret contemporary perspectives on the
public and private.
This critical departure from traditional philosophical method de-
serves attention. By explicating alternative visions, Elshtain clev-
erly reveals the social construction of reality. She outlines four ma-
jor streams of feminism (radical, liberal, Marxist, and
psychoanalytic), shows the strengths and weaknesses of each
244 / Religious Studies Review
through attention to language and identity, and locates each in its
historical setting (e.g., 80-81 on Hegel). Having brought us down
from the ontologicalpeak of a universal rational method, she moves
from challenging both traditional and feminist views of women to
the task ofreconstruction, which she carries out by calling on politi-
cal imagination and moral sentiments to move directly into a “pub-
lic imperative and responsibility” (299, italics hers).
From this methodological approach, we can gain insight into
Elshtain’s resistance to categorization and the sometimes imtating
convolutions of her thought. Rather than attempting to formulate a
universal theory of gender in its relation to public and private
spheres, she begins with the particular and the personal, calling to
mind her moral teachers Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil, re-
membering what she learned as student. teacher, activist,and mem-
ber of a family (300). Instead of searching for abstract principles,
she emphasizes complexity and illuminates different points of
view, the usually unheard “alternative views of reality.” Her recon-
struction starts, not with the analysis of powerful social structures,
but with a “witness for the victims, all those final solutions” (300).
By beginning with the particular and seeking moral wisdom,
Elshtain brings narrative and ethics to political theory.
That narrative and particular reconstruction, however, keep her
from making an overarching critique of Western patriarchy, an
omission that has concerned many feminists. Given contemporary
understandingsof the situatednessof moral vision, this move can be
constructive for feminist theory in its celebration of diversity. On
the other hand, universalizing an ideal of gender equality is neces-
sary for feminist scholarship and advocacy. A stronger critique of
patriarchy could locate and universalize that vision.
What Elshtain does is demonstratethe importanceof language in
the social construction of the personhood of women in Western so-
ciety. The social relationships that are central to humans are medi-
ated through speech. As language has influenced the presupposi-
tions, actions, and self-understandings of women, their sense of
personhood has been limited, controlled, and evaluated. Elshtain
shows how this limited view of self, derived from gender-based
public/privateunderstandings,can be overcomeby women. She re-
counts the rebel stones of the suffragistsand challenges contempo-
rary women to envision a dream that parallels Martin Luther King’s
dream of social justice (345). This move demonstrates Elshtain’s
belief in the possibility of transformation and her hope for citizen
action for the common good. She calls upon feminists to broaden
what she perceives to be a “thin, instrumentalist” view of what it
means to be an American citizen and to embrace the struggle of
early American revolutionaries to “demand that America make
good on its commitmentsto human rights and equaljustice” (345).
Throughout her work, Elshtain continues to call her readers to a
citizenship ethic that seeksthe common good? While she warns of a
lacuna in civil society, she continues to believe that the United
States will find the energy and resources required for transforma-
tion. In a recent review of Stephen L. Carter’s pessimistic treatise,
The Dissent ofrhe Governed (1998): she agrees that “liberal mo-
nism” (“the view that all institutions within a plural, democraticor-
der must conform to one standardof reason, one principle of author-
ity, one unitary norm of ‘governance”’) is misguided (23). But,
unlike Carter, she continues to hope for “the coming of a more
nuanced and realistic set of legislative initiatives and judicial re-
views of those initiatives” that would see in the Declarationof Inde-
pendence “not a sham but a living, breathing reality” (25). One may
ask if this optimism is well-founded. Increasing federal budgets for
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
building prisons, combined with a decrease in the willingness of
American citizens to support government programs for the impov-
erished members of society, are only two of many trends that may
indicate an entrenchment of the individual instrumental emphasis
decried by Elshtain.
Women and War
Elshtain also focuses on the topic of women and war. Here her em-
phasis on narrative is central, beginning with her own story: child-
hood reverence for Joan of Arc and dreams of war and heroism, fol-
lowed by rude awakenings when she contracted polio and
witnessed an anti-American activities investigation against her
German immigrant father. Looking back on Elshtain’s work, one
can see the impact of these experienceson her interests, her choice
of research projects, and even some of her conclusions.The mistrust
of excessive nationalism that she demonstrates in New Wine and
Old Bottles provides a case in point.
This methodological move marks a significant postmodern turn
in Elshtain’s work. In contrastto such theorists as Jurgen Habermas,
who does not mention in his writings that his Theory ofcommuni-
cative Acfion (1981) was inspired by a student political protest
march in Germany! Elshtain unabashedly claims her own experi-
ence as partner and informer of her political theory. She follows her
personal account with a historical overview of symbols of war and
theories about war in the Western tradition. Her intention is not to
give a chronological survey but to show how “stories of war and
politics structure individual and collective experience in ways that
set the horizon for human expectations in later epochs” (48). The
problem, of course, is who chooses which stories for what purpose
and subsequently whose horizon of meanings is changed and how.
Elshtain’s narrative approach answers these questions indirectly,
but she does not address the problems that generalizing from her
own experience and choice of narratives engenders.The problem of
generalizing is not unique to Elshtain but is a major dilemma in
writing historical accounts in a postmodem age, which, having seen
through “objectivist”history, neverthelesshas a hard time replacing
it.
Elshtain does generalizeher treatment of this selective historical
account, but she emphasizes the narrative quality of the develop-
ment of these symbols and their connection to people’s practices.
She describes writing about war and politics as coexisting in a con-
stitutive relationship with the practice of war and politics (48).Here
she relates the social construction of reality to ordinary activities of
agents in the world-an important emphasis that recurs throughout
her work and one that is crucial for women. Meaning is constructed
not from ideas or economic pressures alone but also through the or-
dinary activities of everyday life.5
Elshtain’s goals in recounting a selective history of women and
war reveal moral intentions. Like the classic social theorists Marx
and Durkheim, Elshtain wants to study society in order to improve
it. Her goal in this work is to explore the reasons for and to resist
“armed civic virtue” (42-43). Leaving behind both Enlightenment
rationalism and claims to objective history, Elshtain moves toward
the hermeneutical goal of understanding, looking at “the way war
stories are deeded to us as texts” (48). She brings to that task a strong
sense of civic responsibility but avoids moralizing, highlighting in-
stead the tensions and incompletenessof her attempt tojoin political
theory and unarmed civic virtue. She illustrates this dilemma by
commenting on her horror at the thought of her son being called
Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001
upon to kill as part of military service: “His mother says she will
never allow it. The political theorist, Professor Elshtain, knows she
cannot stop it with argument, but she knows no other way to try”
(42).
After a whirlwind tour of texts, from Homer’s warriors to the
American Catholic bishops’ Pastoral Letter of 1983, Elshtain steps
back to critique the symbols she has catalogued. Her goal is to pro-
vide glimpsesof history that willjar current stereotypes:“My aim is
to loosen up the congealmentsof the present as these get reinforced
by a past we cannot avoid as historic beings” (163). Therefore, she
sets out vigorously to deconstruct the notion that “locates women in
an auxiliary and pacific role in relation to war in the modem West,
leaving the war fighting and dying to the men” (164).
Here Elshtain takes another step toward dismantling the pub-
lic/privategender role divisions outlined earlier in Public Man, Pri-
vate Woman.Her own idealization of war as a young girl and her
public arguments against war as a political theorist and a mother
augmenther historical accounts of women in warefforts. She writes
of the French Resistance in World War 11: “Women have described
their wartime activities as personally liberating despite pervasive
fears and almost paralyzing anxieties. None regrets her choice to
fight or be in the thick of the fighting” (177). Such accounts level the
playing field between the sexes, showingthat women have the same
range of passions in war that Western understandings have tradi-
tionally attributed to men.
This task of postmodem deconstruction serves Elshtain well in
her resistance to the notion of armed civic virtue. She seeks to open
up ways to revision notions of war that allow modem people to con-
strue the passions and horrors of war in alternative,
nonstereotypical ways. But her critique of modem Western social
constructionsdoes not deny the necessity of state-sanctionedarmed
combat. Rather, Elshtain embraces a chastened and more egalitar-
ian understanding of human aspirations and passions and the partic-
ipation of both men and women in those passions. Her deconstruc-
tion sets aside notions of a grand narrative of war and women’s roles
in it and invites the reader to “explore alternative identities” (269).
Elshtainjoins in that exploration herself, speaking of universal aspi-
rations and possibilities(269).Rather than give up universal ideals,
she chooses to speak of them confessionally, with an
epistemological humility that becomes a scholar who makes use of
postmodern insights. Her assessment does not leave out universal
ethical longings-in her case a longing for citizenship that cele-
brates difference. She insists, however, that the universal and par-
ticular need each other: “A universalism that sustains respect for
differenceis a universalismattuned to our very human need for con-
crete reference groups” (270).
Reinforcing this sensitivity to difference, Elshtain resists the re-
alpolitik “self,” stubbornly insisting on declaring herself as “other”
by maintaining a politics that includes a moral voice (32). Here the
theme of hope in transformation clearly inserts itself into the text.
She writes: “politics stripped of moral considerations made no
sense to King, no sense at all; and I knew it didn’t to me either, not
really, even as I mastered realist lingo and ways of thinking.... I
hoped inchoately that I might one day put together mothering and
political thinking rather than have to put aside the one in order to en-
gage in the other” (32).6Elshtain’s hope is that this connection will
be made as men and women “take up the alternatives woven
throughout the story of women and war and resist those identities
that lock us inside the traditionaland dangerous narrativeof war and
peace” (258). Elshtain does not describe how resisting those tradi-
&?WOW StlldkS & V k W /
tional identities could result in solutions to the larger political prob-
lems of nuclear deterrents, economic exploitation, and totalitarian
reigns of terror or genocide, but she does plant a seed, her under-
standing of the social and linguistic construction of reality leading
her to encourage us to envision as yet unimagined worlds (258).
~ ~ _ _
Power Trivs and Other Joumevs
In Power Trips and Other Journeys (1990), Elshtain continues her
exploration of identities by delving into the complexities of socially
constructed notions of power, arguing that incompatibilities be-
tween civic and family spheres create tensions that should not be
ameliorated by overarching systematic theories. She describes
Plato’s depiction of the ideal society in his Republic to demonstrate
the depersonalizationand totalism of a system that does away with
family life (45-46). Such universalizing views in the Western tradi-
tion minimize women’s power and overlook political and theologi-
cal connectionsfound in the multilayered overlappingof public and
private domain^.^
Elshtain prefers a less organized, more organic, and even messy
complexity. She offers Jane Addams as an example of a theorist
whose paradoxical, sometimes contradictory, views developed out
of attempts in practice to interpret opposing social forces. Hull
House displaysthe action basis of Addams’stheory while her use of
Hegel allows for an idealism that balances the harsh social and eco-
nomic realities of early twentieth-century inner city Chicago (10).
Here Elshtain argues for action and moral vision as integral parts of
political theory. By choosing Addams as a theorist, Elshtain dis-
plays her conviction that practice informs theory and that a struggle
around values is part of societal life.
Demonstrating tension between democratic politics and family
life not only in historical examples but also in futuristic feminist
theories, Elshtain takes Shulamith Firestone’s radical feminist vi-
sion to task because, like researchersand policymakerswho support
technological intervention for the sake of monopoly of power,
Firestone sees human biology as a limitation to be overcome (46).
Such theories follow Plat0 in both shunning emotion and minimiz-
ing or ignoring the biological roles of the sexes. Elshtain moves in
the opposite direction, seeing a complementarity in the diverging
goals and values of political and family life.
Elshtain’s use of narrative in this work continues with an analy-
sis of Simone Weil and comparisons between Addams and Eleanor
Roosevelt, bringing to the fore the importance of social interpreta-
tion as the contributions of particular women in their contexts are
presented to shed light on the intricacies of power and the
situatedness of ethics. Weil’s social idealism, eclectic thought, and
almost tragic sense of otherness are used to augment Elshtain’s ri
tique of the bifurcations of Western political and moral thought. InE-
contrast to Addams’s theory of opposing forces in society, Elshtain
draws interesting connections among Roosevelt’s ethic of family
values, her views of politeness, traditional Christian interpretations
of care of the weak, and the economic realities of the depressionera.
Together these stories illustrate the twentieth-century struggle to
deal with issues of power in the widening gaps between the individ-
ual and economic, private and public, moral and political realms.
In her analysis of contemporary power relations, Elshtain fo-
cuses on the social constructedness of our understandings. Rather
than accepting at face value current societal interpretations of dis-
turbing issues, she shows that perceptions may be manipulated and
exaggerated.Taking violence against women and child abuse as ex-
246 / Religious Studies Review
amples, she cogently argues that current views are influenced by
other societal abuses, fears, and emphases in late twentieth-century
American society. While these arguments enable Elshtain to bal-
ance a more complex interpretation of how understandings of
power are influenced by multiple factors, the reader is left with an
erroneous impression that domestic violence may not be as serious
as the evidence shows it to be?
Elshtain’scommitmentto situating thinkers in their specificcon-
texts yields creative insights. While one may argue with specific
conclusions in this wide-ranging discussion, the fruitfulness of
Elshtain’s contextual and narrative approach, along with her em-
phasis on the situatednessof moral convictions, forges a fascinating
and different path through current topics and issues. She showshow
rationality locates itself in institutions, how formal and informal
sourcesof power complementand sometimescontradict each other,
how obsession with power turns in on itself, how excessive empha-
sis on independence can lead to greater control. In contrast to argu-
ments of women’s powerlessness, this work clearly demonstrates
that female power has always been a vital part of women’s lives in
the American context.
In this work, Elshtain integrates and further demonstrates the
usefulness of her methodological tools: 1) an appreciation for the
malleability of socially constructed reality, 2) an emphasis on con-
text and narrative as sources for meaning construction, and 3) an in-
tegration of values and moral visions with political discourse.
While rejecting both naturalistic and interventionist radical femi-
nist theories, she nonetheless demonstrates a method that vitally
connects issues of concern to women with interpretation of mean-
ing and world reconstruction. In doing so, Elshtain makes a vital
contribution to feminist theory.
Democracy on Trial
In Democracy on Trial (1993, Elshtain addresses democracy and
civic life in the United States, a topic that causes her much concern.
She begins this series of five lectures by outlining signs that seem to
indicate that the American experiment in democracy is failing. Ac-
cording to Elshtain, the top-heavy welfare state bases policies on
need, which leads to social engineering,depersonalization,and apa-
thy (20). The focus on individual rights erodes helpful structures of
authority (32). Rhetorical excesses lead to perceptions that victim-
ize people living normal lives (43). She outlines reasons for this
view, exploring “warning signs of exhaustion, cynicism, opportun-
ism, and despair” (1). “It is quite a mess,” she says, “but it is not
America’s mess alone” (25).
Elshtain explores possible causes of the cynicism she describes:
the politics of displacement that conflates public and private (44),
identity politics that pit groups against one another because of dif-
ference (53). the militant liberationists who seek government pro-
tection for their private behaviors (57). The underlying thesis of her
analysis is that the loss of distinction between public and private
realms has resulted in a strange reversal-the public has become
private and the private has become public and all distinctions are
obliterated. Elshtain claims that this conflation “puts democracy
continuouslyon trial: If there are no distinctions between public and
private, personal and political, it follows that there can be no differ-
entiatedactivity or set of institutionsthat are genuinely political, the
purview of citizens and the bases of order, legitimacy, and purpose In Augustine and the Limits of Politics (1995), Elshtain engages in
in a democratic community” (44).This lament for the loss of a pub- dialogue with a fourth- and fifth-century Christian theologian to ex-
lic political life leads Elshtain to decry the exclusionist sameness plore issues of limitation and human evil in the political realm.
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
that she and Sheldon Wolin see arising from the politics of differ-
ence (74-75). Elshtain’s celebration of difference seems to become
strained at this point as she sees factionism and the public demands
of particular groups overtaking the common basis of equality upon
which democratic life has been built. Elshtain feels beleaguered by
seemingly unending demands for political correctness, lamenting,
“I am weary of being accused of bad faith no matter what I do, or
say, or refrain from doing or saying” (77).
I think Elshtain overreacts to multiculturalism, seeing identity
politics more as a threat than an asset to public life. That minority
groups, disabled Americans, women, and young people now speak
for their own integrity and solidarity,demanding respect and recog-
nition, actually enhancespolitical life. If the welfare state led to apa-
thy, identity politics leads to involvement.It seems to me that the is-
sue is how to negotiate the rights of various groups, a process that
requires limiting the rights of dominant groups in order to establish
the rights of minority groups. The traditions of the dominant Euro-
pean/Anglo-Saxon society are being challenged as the renegotia-
tion of inclusion occurs in the public square.
Besides outlining and critiquing crucial issues that contribute to
her perception of the decline of democracy, Elshtain laments the
modem search for grand narratives and one overarching system of
political order. She traces the loss of civic life in the United States in
part to this unifying pressure and argues strongly for revival of the
middle ground that family and institutional life provide, suggesting
that the collapse of private and public life leaves individuals and
families open to scrutiny and vulnerable to loss. For example, on the
one hand, militant liberationists demand that those who prefer not to
go public with their homosexual orientation be forced to do so; on
the other, “the demand for public validation of sexual preferences,
by ignoring the distinction between the personal and the political,
also threatens to erode authentic civil rights, including the right to
privacy” (57).
While critical of current trends, Elshtain expresses strong belief
in the ability of women and men to participate as citizens in resisting
diffusion and rebuilding civic life in today’s society. Reachingback
into debates about democracy in ancient Greece, she argues for a
politics of difference, a form of governance for the “stout of heart
who know there are things worth fighting for in a world of paradox,
ambiguity, and irony” (89). For such a society to thrive, education
for tolerance as well as compromise is necessary. The payoff is free-
dom and “fellowship,” which she links as encouragement for a fal-
tering populace to initiate action for equality and justice (124-26).
Her examples, the civil rights movement in the United States and
Las Madres in Central and Latin America, are, not surprisingly,pro-
test movements. Our huge ungainly political process provides few
opportunities for concerted positive action on the national level.
Elshtain herself admits that “Votes may not matter much” (115).
The hope that civil society may be reinvigoratedby love of freedom,
values of human dignity and solidarity among citizens, and individ-
ual responsibility is a wonderful hope, but it leaves untouched the
larger project of restructuring democraticlife to provide legitimized
ways that citizens can enact those values and ensure their continu-
ance.
Augustine and the Limits of Politics
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
While agreeing with Plat0 and Augustine that evil is a lack of good
rather than a reality in itself, Elshtain also asserts with Augustine
that the search for a perfect and universal system of order is wrong-
headed. Instead, we must recognize the imperfection of humans and
all systems that humans devise.
Elshtain here seems to be arguing in two ways for a comfort zone
with the messiness she previously described in Democracy on Trial.
First, if we do not expect or demand perfection, we may be able to
live more comfortably with compromise and partial solutions. Sec-
ond, if we give up the search for an overarching order, we may be
more content with present disorder or disjunction between parts of
society.While she does not embrace Augustine’s two cities, a heav-
enly and an earthly city that organize themselves differently, she
does insist on a diversity of structural realms that may contradict or
relate to one another in paradoxical ways. The public realm differs
from private family life; the mediating structures of civil society
differ from the organization and role of the state.
After establishing these parameters, she searches for possible so-
lutions to the problems that have long occupied her scholar-
ship-the role of family life in society, the division of women and
men’s roles in the public sphere, issues of power, individualism,
and identity, the importance of democracy, and the centrality of
civic life in sustaining society. Drawing from Augustine’s analysis
of the theological virtues, Elshtain suggests that caritas, Christian
love, can support civil society today. Caritas is compatible with in-
dividualism-an individualism that is not self-absorbed but looks
to the common good. Elshtain writes, “We modems tend to presup-
pose a free-standing individual and then to posit a state that we call
sovereign. What connects the individual to the state is a series of re-
ciprocal rights and obligations” (25). She wants to fill the gap cre-
ated by this conception with an ethic of caritas, which she defines as
“not moralistic self-abnegation but an abundant overflowing of the
fullness of life” (36). Such an ethic looks beyond individual rights
and.obligations, as love looks to the good of others.
By highlighting caritus, Elshtain supports individualism, rescu-
ing it from negative atomistic stereotypes and affirming its value.
Citizens can act together, but each citizen must act to create a soci-
ety of freedom and equality. Responsibility goes beyond individual
rights and obligations yet roots itself in individual moral agency. An
ethic of Christian love may provide a moral framework for citizen-
ship ethics. I use this term to em hasize individual agency in public
ethics in democratic societies,“an agency in which Elshtain places
a good deal of hope for muddling through the modern problems of
democracy.
I suggest that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South
Africa may be seen as an example of caritas in action in the political
realm. While the victors in other nations were slaughtering the van-
quished, South African leaders Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu
were practicing caritas, enabling forgiveness and reconciliation to
occur in post-apartheid South Africa. This demonstration of the in-
tegration of religious values with the dispensing of public justice
exemplifies, I think, the cogency of Elshtain’s reunion of religious
values and public life.
In Augustine and rhe Limits ofPolitics, Elshtain acts clearly out
of her epistemological conviction of the situatedness and
contextuality of knowledge. The theological move she makes is
consistent with that position in recognizing the integration of val-
ues, traditions, and context. Augustine was, after all, a political the-
orist, albeit one who lived before the development of “value-free”
social science. Elshtain follows his lead, reuniting values, Christian
ReUgiow Studies M e w / 247
tradition, and political theory. Unlike Augustine, however, she
makes little reference to the heavenly city, thereby muting the theo-
logical chasm created by Augustine’s two-cities approach. She also
differs from Augustine in that she makes this integration in a mod-
ern context, with full awareness of the implicationsof the move she
is making. Abandoning the modern project of finding a universal
system of order, she steps back into the Christian narrative. com-
bines it with her expertise as a political theorist, and comes up with
an ethic for contemporary society.
The dangers of connecting a particular religion with public life
and state authority are well-documented in history. Nonetheless, re-
connecting religious values with public values or finding religious
sources for values cherished by particular societies remains an im-
portant project for today’s world. Recognizing that need, Arvind
Sharma, in conjunction with colleagues at McGill University, has
’
developed a “Declaration of Human Rights by the World’s Reli-
gions.”’ This document and the work of other theorists who utilize
religious values to augment or revision the other values held by so-
cieties can foster the development of a healthy interaction between
religious values and public life.
New Wine and Old Bottles
In New Wine and Old Bottles (1998), Elshtain continues to develop
political theory in this more theological mode. Her assertion that
“politics and ethics are and always have been mutually constitutive
activities” is here applied to discussions of nationhood and sover-
eignty (5). Moral commitments frame her argument against the
backdrop of her own experience of an overzealous nationalism that
led to an accusation of her father being a German “sympathizer”
during World War I1 (Women and War, 18). Experience has taught
Elshtain that, whilejustice itself is an ethical concept, it is force that
finally arbitrates whose notion of justice will be sustained. The in-
evitable connection of force with justice opens the way for Elshtain
to explore alternative dimensions of nationalism-how norms,
rules, and theological views influence the concept of sovereignty.
That concept itself developed in the West from Judeo-Christian
theological understandings of God, God’s will, and how God’s will
was thought to be embodied in the person of the political or reli-
gious sovereign. While Western political theorists moved away
from that concept during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
replacing it with Rousseau’s notion of a general will embodied in
the people, theologians have continued to wrestle with the idea of
God’s interest in and rule over human societies. Elshtain reiterates
Pope John Paul 11’s chastened view that the good of a nation is real-
ized through its identification with the common good that illustrates
God’s will. Religions, as a part of civil society, rather than imposing
their will on society, should remain in dialogue with the state.
In this book, the topic of nationalism becomes a playing field for
tensions in Elshtain’s thought-the universal vs. the particular,
identity vs. loyalty, force vs. dialogue, one will vs. a plurality of
wills. Having outlined in previous books the “trial” facing democ-
racy and the “limits” of politics, she now sketches the contemporary
situation among nations attempting to navigate those tensions, illus-
trating her arguments with voices from Eastern Europe, South Af-
rica, and Northern Ireland, among others. Citizens in relation, even
citizens embracing Elshtain’s preferred ethic of responsibility, fail.
Misjudgments are made; misdeeds occur. Elshtain again turns to a
theological concept for help, asking whether the idea of forgiveness
may forestall broken relationships among nations or bring healing
248 / Religious studies Review Volume 27 Number 3 /July 2001

to already alienated nations. “Is this form of forgiveness (recipro-

COSMOS& CULTURE
cal forgiveness and reconciliation), ...available only to communi-
cants of a faith?” she inquires (45). She thinks not. Rather, she is David Toolan
convinced that the process of reconciliation and forgiveness pro-
vides “a moral deposit on which future generations can draw in an At Home in
effort not to slide back into recriminatory cycles” (45). Elshtain is
not invitinga move toward a sacred state; instead, while remaining
the Cosmos
a civic pluralist, she is suggestingthat Christian virtues may have a Shows how a Christ-centered,
place in power relations among nations. incarnational faith provides the
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa most appropriate setting for con-
showed that such a policy is possible. Yet, the question of restitu- temporary scientific cosmology.
tion persists. Father Michael Lapsley, a white victim of a letter
“Original, sophisticated and ethi-
bomb attack in South Africaduring apartheid, speaks of the restitu-
tion that the process of justice must include. To forgive the perpe- cally inspiring-this is an important
trator was a good thing, but Lapsley believes that the persons who contribution to the dialogue
caused the loss of his hands should also pay restitution by support- between science and religion.”
1-57075-34 1-5
ing him in his disabled state.12How forgiveness and justice can be hardcover $25.00 -JOHN HAUGHT
adjudicatedin specific situations is a question that must be raised if
the conceptof forgiveness is to enter the realm of politicaljustice.
RenC Girard
Comparison with Robert N. Bellah
I See Satan Falling
One way to situate Elshtain’s work is to construe it as an attempt to
revive the republican and biblical traditions, a revival of the sort
Like Lightning
Robert Bellah and his colleagues called for in Habits ofthe Heart “Rene Girard brings our attention
(1985). The comparison with Bellah is instructive. Some of to three facts without which we will
Elshtain’s themes and sources are reminiscent of Bellah’s never make sense of our lives, our
work-her use of Tocqueville,her turn toward theological themes, world or our faith, namely: the role
her critique of atomistic individualism. Both she and Bellah em- violence has played in cultural life,
phasize the importanceof community and the necessity of individ-
uals working together for the common good. Both have a conserva-
the role mimesis plays in psycho-
tive streak despite emphases on economic justice in Elshtain and logical and social life, and the role
communitarianism in Bellah’s work.13 Both lament the loss of the Bible plays in revealing both.”
1-57075-3 19-9
middle-levelinstitutions,claiming that they comprisean important paperback $20.00 -GIL BAILIE
part of the fabric of civil society. Both issue warnings about this
loss and attempt to reestablish the importance of democratic and
theological resources in contemporary life. In doing so, they each
depart from the “value-free” expectations of their disciplines and Eleazar S. Fernandez and
enter into interdisciplinary work. Both seek to improve society Fernando F. Segovia, editors
rather than merely describeit or, alternatively,predict or control its A Dream
future.
Nevertheless,Elshtain develops some themes rather differently Unfinished
from Bellah. Her particular focus on women and the protection of Theological Reflections on
the private spherecarves out a place for a rich private life and a con- America from the Margins
structive individualism.Her focus on economicjustice and power
relations leads to sensitivity toward marginalized groups whom “This book works like a most wel-
she believes have been hurt by a liberalizing trend toward “equal- come midwife for the 21st century,
ity,’’ an ironic echo of Tocqueville’s fear. Her public philosophy birthing ‘America’ and ‘theology’
emphasizes relationality and an ethic of responsibility. Feminist from lives that are African-
insights clearly influence Elshtain’s focus and conclusions. American, Asian-American, Latinda
1-5 7075-367-9
paperback $24.00 and more. You thought you knew
From Theorist to Prophet? what ‘America’ and ‘theology’were.
Elshtain has moved from looking at history and outlining alterna- Think again, and welcome the gift of
tive feminist responses to making use of the Western traditions as this book.” -MARK TAYLOR

-
resources for creative analysis and response to what she views as
the current social malaise. Her voice has become a significant one
in analyzing trends and creatively taking us another step into fu-
At vour bookseller or dire1
tures that acknowledgethe limits and ambiguity of our humanness.
Through highlighting different perspectives, she constructs alter-
1-800-258-5838
Volume 27 Number 3 / July 2001
native views and suggests new directions for action. For example,
“the assertion that women are the principal victims of violent crime
is false: The most vulnerable body to inhabit in America today ... is
that of a young black male” (Democracy On Trial, 5 1, italics hers).
That insight alone generates empathy and reduces fear. Her analysis
of the current focus on child abuse provides another example, lead-
ing her to suggest that child care be more integrated with family life
(Power Trips). Such ideas result from combininga thick description
of particular societal situations and opinions with an understanding
of the social constructedness of reality and an appreciation of the
limitations of human persons and social structures.
Despite those limitations, Elshtain maintains a sobered opti-
mism. In fact, her prophetic voice grows louder with each ensuing
work. She neither romanticizes the past nor hates the present. Ralph
Waldo Emerson pointed out that skeptics, despite their pessimistic
outlook, are often surprised at how well things actually turn out.
When that happens, Emerson claims, the skeptic is drawn toward
faith.I4 Elshtain retains a kind of tempered optimism that exhibits
such faith. At the same time, she refuses nostalgia, questioning tra-
ditional assumptions and searching for alternative interpretations
that emerge from perspectives not usually attended to by scholars.
She continues to bring us creative insights on pressing issues
through research that integrates deeply rooted traditions with de-
scriptions of specific problems and situations. “Politics,” she says,
“has to do with tending to one’s particular home and its place in the
wider world in which one gets one’s bearings” (New Wine,34). She
does her work in this way, drawing from her life experience as a po-
litical theorist, a woman, and a person of faith.
Political theory, like other human sciences, currently faces a crit-
icaljuncture, a crisis of legitimization in a milieu that recognizes the
situatedness and value-fullness of knowledge. Elshtain navigates
thatjuncture, making the postmodern turn smoothly. She avoids the
dangers of either stopping with deconstruction, like Michel
Foucault, or getting stranded on another ontological peak,like John
Milbank.’’ Her limited and engaged political theory sparks debate
with other voices, engaging them across academic disciplines and
historical and social contexts. In so doing, she makes a considerable
contribution to the conversation about political forms, good ends,
and citizenship ethics.
Notes
1. Bellah and his colleagues (Richard Madsen. William M. Sullivan, Ann
Swidler, Steven M. Tipton) point to a lack of understanding of and participation in
social institutions that mediate between the individual household and the planetary
Religious Studies Review / 249
ecosystem-a gap in awareness between the local and global levels (The GoodSoci-
ety [New York: Random House, 19921, 13-14).
2. I also develop this notion in Citizenship Ethics: Contriburionsof Classical Vir-
tue Theory and Responsibility Ethics (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989). In contrast to a gen-
eral public ethic, I argue for a cirizenship erhic that can motivate individuals to act for
the common good, locating sources for that ethic not in universal principles but in
Western traditions, both Greek and Christian.
3. “The Know-It-All State: How Liberalism Suppresses Dissent,” Books and
Culture: A Christian Review 6:1 (JanuarylFebruary, 2000). 22-25.
4. Axel Honneth, Eberhard Knodler-Bunte, and Arno Widmann, ‘The Dialectics
of Rationalization:An Interview with Jiirgen Habermas,” Tefos49 (Fall, 1981). 13.
5.In my research on Indonesian women leaders, I found thatpracricesdeveloped
by women who chose a life direction that departed from traditional expectations not
only sustained their dedication to their chosen tasks but changed the framework and
meaning of those endeavors for them (Making OneselfStrange: Gender Ideology,
Moral Development and Social Change in Indonesia [Syracuse University Press.
forthcoming]).
6. I struggled with this dilemma in the 1960s and 1970sas I protested the Vietnam
War and the nuclear arms buildup. My dissertation grew out of a mother’s question,
“How could I teach my children to be loyal citizens when I was consistently protest-
ing the actions of our nation?” Looking back now, I can see that locating ethics for
citizenship at the individual level made room for conscience-dictated loyal protest as
part of seeking the common good.
7. Her argument traces the shift from patriarchal to contractual authority in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (50-51). The search for “perfect congruence be-
tween political and familial modes” contributed to the lack of complexity in under-
standing familial relations.
8. Elshtain notes, “The notion of uprooted rootedness may appear impossibly
paradoxical, but it flows directly fro.%Weil’s prior commitment to a cosmology that
is essentially Platonic, an epistemology indebted to Kant’s phenomenal-noumenal
split and a severely Manichean metaphysic” (20).
9. While, according to Murray Straus, female partners initiate about 50 percent of
all domestic assaults, Kersti Yllo’s research indicates that “women are seven times
more likely than men to be severely injured by their partners” (‘The Spaghetti Fac-
tor,” Lingua Franca [September, 19991, 10-11).
10. See Citizenship Ethics.
1 1. Presented at Chapman University’s conference, “Human Rights and Respon-
es: The Contribution of the World’s Religions,” April 8-9. 1999.
12. Speech at the 10th International Conference of the International Association
for Mission Studies, University of South Africa at Hammanskrall, South Africa. Jan-
uary 25,2000.
13. In his essay “Freedom, Coercion, and Authority,” Bellah appeals to Elshtain
in his argument that when authority disappears, freedom collapses into coercion. A
more radical voice would ask, “Whose authority?” CSSR Bulletin 28:2 (April, 1999),
35 (reprinted from Academe 85:l [JanuarylFebruary, 19991.16-21).
14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Montaigne; or The Skeptic” in Selectiom from
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960).
300-301.
15.I think particularly of Michel Foucault’s conclusion in Madnessand Civiliza-
rion: A Hisrory of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965)
that madness is integral to the moment of creation and responsibility (288-89. Vin-
tage edition, 1973). and John Milbank’s proposal of Christian theology as a coun-
ter-ontology to the failure of secular reason in Theology and Social Theory: Beyond
Secular Reason (Oxford Blackwell, 1990), 422 and 434.